Yeah, the core ergonomics is significantly lagging behind most other backend languages despite improvements in some areas. I even wrote an article https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab... .

As for concurrency/async, it's possible to do requests in parallel with curl_multi_*. Other async/prallel things are also possible, but tend to be more complicated compared to JS or other languages with promise and async support.