While yes, I/O is often a computational bound, I'd be shy to really say that in a consumer space when we aren't installing flash buffers, performing in situ processing, or even pre-fetching. Hell, in many programs I barely even see any caching! TBH, most stuff can greatly benefit from asynchronous and/or parallel operations. Yeah, I/O is an issue, but I really would not call anything I/O bound until you've actually gotten into parallelism and optimizing code. And even not until you apply this to your I/O operations! There is just so much optimization that a compiler can never do, and so much optimization that a compiler won't do unless you're giving it tons of hints (all that "inline", "const", and stuff you see in C. Not to mention the hell that is template metaprogramming). Things you could never get out of a non-typed language like python, no matter how much of the backend is written in C.
That said, GPU programming is fucking hard. Godspeed you madman, and thank you for your service.