Async highlight command causes intro to disappear

[modille]

If you're not using any startup plugins like alpha, startify, etc. then neovim shows intro text on startup.

When using this theme (which I love, btw, thank you!) it's not showing that intro text on startup:

You can see it again with :intro:

If I modify lua/solarized/util.lua to not use async for loading plugins/treesitter/lsp highlights then the intro displays on startup like expected:

So it must be that running the highlight commands async like that triggers some event that clears the intro.

Would you consider changing it to not load plugins, treesitter, and lsp async? Or was there some significant performance improvement that motivated you to load them async?