@stjepang when I look at smol (the parts that have been shown so far), every time I think "it can't be so easy, and if yes, what exactly are tokio and async-std doing?" or in other words: very smart people are involved in both projects. what decisions enable your simplifications?
Also, if you look at it, async-std is actually pretty small and simple. Its runtime is only something like 3% of the entire codebase. The remaining 97% is just a bunch of utilities on top of it. :)