My understanding was that this little 6 man team did work on the game in an r&d role, testing stuff for levels, characters etc. So they weren’t a useless team, but I doubt they were as big a deal as the media is making out.

Rust makes multi threading very easy you can just use

thread::spawn();

But rust makes Async difficult because it’s naturally stackless so you need to create your own scheduler or use someone else’s like Tokio. Also, people have a bad habit of conflating async with concurrency which makes it more confusing.