I wonder what do you find so simplifying in futures and promises? I use them heavily in one of the projects and compared to old-school mutexes and condition var

I wonder what do you find so simplifying in futures and promises? I use them heavily in one of the projects and compared to old-school mutexes and condition variables they seem to be just at the same abstraction level. They can cause very similar problems like deadlocks or race conditions, with the additional "bonus" of callback hell if you don't use any higher-level libraries.