Most examples of callback hell on blogs and forum comments are just linear pyramids where each callback neatly waterfalls into the next. They are manageable but

Most examples of callback hell on blogs and forum comments are just linear pyramids where each callback neatly waterfalls into the next. They are manageable but ugly which I think is why it's common to dismiss promises/await as cosmetic. In practice, callbacks become a problem when you need conditional async logic. Like if you have your simple callback pyramid but want to fork the chain at some level and merge it back at the end. What would've been a basic if-condition with promises/await is often an invasive change with callbacks where your only tool is to extract and rewrite logic into helper functions. A simple conceptual change easily blossoms into heavy indirection where taming the complexity becomes an engineering feat. At the end of the day, we all have different appetites for trade-offs.