I don't understand your examples of "Synchronous code that tries to be asynchronous". In fact, the examples you provided are of asynchronous code being...asynch

I don't understand your examples of "Synchronous code that tries to be asynchronous". In fact, the examples you provided are of asynchronous code being...asynchronous. Callbacks are asynchronous (or to be fully correct, I should say that they allow one to program asynchronously, which is exactly what async/await does). Indeed, since you mention continuations, I'm sure you realize that they're more or less callbacks.