You can write custom pints if you're willing to build a custom toolchain (shouldn't be too terrible to rebuild it once a release)
That said, GATs fix a real pain point not actually shown in the article. And that's for impl return types in trait methods. You can have return impl types in normal functions, and even associated methods, just not in trait methods. I think the term for this is existential types. And they occur a lot with async. So async in traits is a real pain point this feature fixes.
