top level await doesn't make async operations synchronous. It mostly eliminates the need to have immediately evaluated wrapper async functions that we would ha

top level await doesn't make async operations synchronous. It mostly eliminates the need to have immediately evaluated wrapper async functions that we would have needed so far. (async () => { await foo(); })(); The added benefit is that imported scripts would be implicitly awaited upon, which has been clunky to do otherwise - you'd need to have a module that exposes an async function and expect the consumer to await on them. But the moment you do that you'd no longer be able to directly run the script through node, so you'd end up needing one more file that imports this module and runs it directly. Availability of top-level await makes experimenting with (promise-returning) APIs in REPL much easier. It is also a bit step forward in making typescript more useful as a general purpose scripting language (outside webdev context).