I'm fairly sure his point was that if he wanted code to execute between the calls he would rather write that in his code directly than deal with the cognitive o

I'm fairly sure his point was that if he wanted code to execute between the calls he would rather write that in his code directly than deal with the cognitive overhead of reasoning about constant async calls. Async makes a lot of sense in cases where you are waiting for an event outside of your server's process, but async calls in the same code base seem a bit over the top.