Yup, your understanding is correct. That code behaves equivalently to the synchronous version, and the only benefit is that the thread can run other tasks while

Yup, your understanding is correct. That code behaves equivalently to the synchronous version, and the only benefit is that the thread can run other tasks while it's waiting for the getStuff() and getMoreStuff() to come back. Async/await is really popular in the JavaScript community because in web apps, you usually only have a single thread of execution which you share with the browser UI code. So if your code made a network request synchronously, the user might not be able to scroll or click links or anything until it finished.