Why didn't you use Kotlin coroutines? My understanding is that they achieve the same as Quasar without the insanity.
You may also want to look at Vert.X. Its evolved into a lot more than a REST framework. It uses thread-per-core and nonblocking to achieve high performance instead of green threads. It theoretically performs better because there's not a lot of stacks hanging around and only 1 thread per core. There's a lot of callbacks though, so if you're not used to RxJava style chaining its hard to get used to. Its very much like Node.
Erlang or Go would be the easiest if you need a lot of threads. If you just need high performance with a lot of connections, Vert.X may suffice. Java IO in recent years is fully non-blocking so you don't need a lot of threads for high concurrency. Vert.X can handle millions of concurrent clients, enough that you will need to adjust your kernel to hit its limits. And its built on Netty which is rock solid.