rust tokio library tokio::spawn is not spawing first task but does spawn subsequent tasks

Question

i am trying to call a function which firsts sets up a TCPListener, then passes this to a function to poll the incoming tcp streams and then call a handle function on these streams, i can get it working with rayon but as my use case will have blocking I/O better to use tokio, when send test tcp connection request ive determined it never calls the handle_tcp_client function on first request (put println!("test") at top and never printed) but then after that it does get called (prints it) and returns expected to requesting tcp client

//in main (returns true):

match start_tcp_server(20000){
    true => (),
    false => return
}

//last line of start_tcp_server:

start_thread(run_tcp_server(socket.into()))

//run tcp server function

async fn run_tcp_server(listener: TcpListener){
    for stream in listener.incoming() {
        match stream{
            Ok(new_stream) => _ = start_thread(handle_tcp_client(new_stream)), 
            // tests show above line returns true on 1st and 2nd call but doesnt spawn on 1st  
            Err(e) => println!("Error with stream: {}",e)
        }
    }
}

//start thread function

pub fn start_thread(future : impl Future<Output = ()> + Send + 'static) -> bool{
    match GLOBAL_RUNTIME.get_or_init(|| Runtime::new().map_or(None, |x| Some(x))){
        Some(runtime) => {
            runtime.spawn(future);
            true
            //this returns true every time but doesnt actually spawn future first time is called
        }
        None => false
    }
}

//GLOBAL_RUNTIME

static GLOBAL_RUNTIME: OnceLock<Option<Runtime>> = OnceLock::new();

Again this works fine on rayon with 1st and all future tcp streams being returned (call rayon::spawn directly from functions for that), guessing is a problem with using a global runtime, anyone know why this not working?