Yes! Decoupling is the goal of this! Using non-blocking IO is still useful in this case because it means we can wait on two conditions at once (i.e. socket IO and time), see [0].
It is possible to do the same blocking IO but it feels a little less natural: You have to set the read-timeout on the socket to the time when you need to wake-up the state machine.
[0]: https://github.com/firezone/sans-io-blog-example/blob/99df77...
