> Aside: All of the above work on many operating systems and support API’s other than epoll, which is Linux specific. The Internet is mostly made of Linux, so epoll is the API that matters.
That quote is talking about epoll-using software (Go, nginx and 'most programming languages', including Rust), not polling-based APIs. You should instead quote:
> without BSD’s kqueue (which preceded epoll by two years), we’d really be in trouble because the only alternatives were proprietary (/dev/poll in Solaris 8 and I/O Completion Ports in Windows NT 3.5).
The article makes that clear.