These things take time. A lot of people at Apple are heavily invested in Swift on the server, including the Swift core team: https://swift.org/server/
Swift itself still needs time to mature, too. Things like the memory model, async/await, generics, etc. The future is bright, it will just require some patience to get there.
This line is just meant to keep the process alive. The actual implementation of the ServerDriver uses threads. It's also worth mentioning that Vapor is totally protocol-based and modular, so you can easily plug in any class that conforms to ServerDriver and replace this logic.
We are working hard to make all aspects of Vapor totally type safe. But, just by merit of being Swift, it's already infinitely more type safe than something like PHP.
A key goal of the project is to avoid the use of `Any` anywhere possible, and to move any run time safety checks to compile time.