I'm sure it is, I'm just not terribly happy about that fact.

Thing is, any code you write ultimately starts via input and funnels into output. Those two ends have to be asynchronous, because IO fundamentally is.
That means, if at any point between I and O, you want to write synchronous code, then you have to block execution of that synchronous code while output is happening. And if you're not at least spawning a new thread per input, then you may even block your ability to handle new input.

That can be fine, if your program has only one job to do at a time. But as soon as it needs to do a second job, that blocking becomes a problem and you'll need to refactor lots of things to become asynchronous code.
If you just build it as asynchronous from the start, it's significantly less painful.

But yeah, I guess, it's the usual case of synchronous code being fine for small programs, so tons of programmers never learn to feel comfortable with asynchronous code...