[stevepeg]

No worries, here's my opinion (lots of lang-war stuff, so note "opinion"):

I would say that it depends on your comfort with async code in Rust since much of the web ecosystem is built that way.

If you're comfortable writing async Rust then go for it, the guard rails are there. People complain (especially here) but it's fine. Our entire web backend and our scheduler applications are overwhelmingly async. We have not hit the weird stuff you read about with lifetimes even once.

However, it does expect you to know how it works. You need to understand what the async runtime does otherwise it will add friction. If you're not yet proficient with this part of Rust then you will benefit from having an "expert" on the team as you say, since they can guide the rest.

Our team were all experienced in Rust already when hired so we didn't hit this. If you're uncomfortable then simply choose the language your team already knows. That's the pragmatic choice.