I can see how it would appear that way, but there are times when RxJs and observables are not the right response. For example in the case where you want to make a single HTTP request, the overhead of creating and subscribing to an observable is heavy compared to a an async/await call. I think all tools are worth learning about — both what they are and when is the proper time to use them.

That being said, I think reactive programming has been a huge upgrade to how async is typically handled in programming.