I am not fully sure I agree with the first part of your assessment, but I share the frustration that a feature like this, which would be useful and is not particularly large, is basically ignored by the working group, while larger, more controversial, and less useful features, like keyword generics, are pursued while the more useful things languish.
As the person who proposed this feature - among lots of other ones for async Rust, like run-to-completion async functions (https://github.com/Matthias247/rfcs/blob/e7fd7042f8069e9126e...), structured concurrency, cancellation tokens, etc) - I can unfortunately share this sentiment. It seemed really hard to land anything in async Rust since the priorities don't seem overly clear. Therefore I put a pause on all contribution attempts and went back to just using Rust as a user.