The 1.1 M1 upgrade #25331 contains a new RSocketClient that is similar to the RSocket contract but does not represent a live connection. Rather it obtains a shared connection as needed when requests are made. So it is more comparable to WebClient as opposed to an HTTP connection.
We can investigate the possibility of RSocketRequester.Builder producing an RSocketRequester instance that wraps an RSocketClient vs the Mono<RSocketRequester> returned from the connect method today.