I'd say a bad programmer can produce shit regardless of the tools he is given. What async/await does is make complex async code much easier to read and maintain

I'd say a bad programmer can produce shit regardless of the tools he is given. What async/await does is make complex async code much easier to read and maintain. Of course, you have all the expressive power of callbacks and promises at your disposal too. That's one of the great things about it. It's implemented on top of these constructs and they remain accessible.