You don’t really need anything, they just make forking and subsequent joining+exception handling easier. You can just use the decades old thread api over virtual threads as is if you wish, but this “structured concurrency” concept, similar to goto vs structured control flow will make it much more productive and easier to reason about.
Again, my point is that you often won't want to be blocking. You'll still want to run multiple async calls concurrently, and to do that the syntax is not the familiar synchronous style. You still need to use more complex apis.
