Yes, you're right. It's not entirely similar, it's not IO-less. But in async Rust (or any other stackless coroutine runtimes), IO should be bound to the scheduler. This allows IO events callback scheduler and wake the task it binds to. Exposing and manually pushing state is a good way to decouple IO from the scheduler.
Yes! Decoupling is the goal of this! Using non-blocking IO is still useful in this case because it means we can wait on two conditions at once (i.e. socket IO and time), see [0].
It is possible to do the same blocking IO but it feels a little less natural: You have to set the read-timeout on the socket to the time when you need to wake-up the state machine.
