Well even CPU-bound async functions can have benefits in node.js as they can free up the single javascript thread to do other work while it does the CPU bound w

Well even CPU-bound async functions can have benefits in node.js as they can free up the single javascript thread to do other work while it does the CPU bound work on another thread in the native code. It's definitely a bastardization of the terms a bit, but at its core it's basically a message-passing multi-process system that hides the implementation behind the well-understood (to most programmers that use node) async i/o