Rust may still be a bit too pragmatic, perhaps you could use a language you wrote yourself?

"Aaaand that's the container address orchestrator -- it's written in Haskell by that one guy a few years ago."

It reminds me of some Python threading monstrosity a guy wrote at my first job. He said something like "this is my own take at async".

To be fair to that guy, the Python standard library provides a multitude of incompatible takes at async already, none of which covers all common use cases. The newest take (asyncio) doesn't integrate with external event loops, so unlike similar libraries in C# and Kotlin, it doesn't work with GUI libraries, not even the one in the standard library (tkinter).

The third-party asyncio alternative Trio, on the other hand, has recently added "guest mode" [1] to plug in external event loops, so maybe that will become the one true way to do async.

[1] https://trio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference-lowlevel.htm...

"We wait for it to break for last 3 years just to have excuse to run k8s"

Yes, I've heard Rust has a high learning curve.

By making things in your own language, you stay ahead of the learning curve while others stay perplexed.

"We need a new build system that's built on streams"