To be clear: libuv has had the ability to offload (some?) I/O operators to io_uring since v1.45.0, from 2023, and that's the 8x speed improvement. 2024 is when node.js seemed to enable (or rather, stop disabling) io_uring by default in its own usage of libuv.

Yeah if you look at the libuv release history there’s been a lot of adding and subtracting since then. It’s clearly not all settled but there are chunks.

that's great! just saying io_uring has never been a required dependency to write application logic that avoids blockage on reads.