> Do these really need to be builtins?

We're only beginning to see async iterators being used in the wild, so we can't have a definitive answer at this point.

> They seem too specialized to be widely useful; I've personally never needed them in any async code I've written. It would make more sense to me to put them in a module like operators.

I think putting them to the operators module makes sense, at least for 3.8.  Do you want to work on a pull request?