Because, as indicated by the OP, I'm not using the default event loop of the thread.

Thinking about my code, I now remember that the reason I went down this path was because I wanted to make sure that my functions, like asyncio functions, accepted the optional loop parameter, and that it worked. For it to work my code pretty much has to pass loop everywhere, because that was a design decision I made early on.  So maybe there's nothing interesting for me here after all.