The io specificity is expected to be a temporary situation, and that part of the name may end up being an anachronism in a few years once a usefully large subset of another category of syscalls has been added to io_uring. The shared ring buffers aspect definitely is an implementation detail, but one that does explain why performance is better than other async IO methods (and also avoids misleading people into thinking that it has something to do with the async/await paradigm).

If the BSDs hadn't already claimed the name, it would probably have been fine to call this kqueue or something like that.