Pretty much, yeah. It's yet another sign that JS/Node should have had a keyword to let async functions appear, to the calling code to act async, rather than req

Pretty much, yeah. It's yet another sign that JS/Node should have had a keyword to let async functions appear, to the calling code to act async, rather than requiring a keyword to stop that. IOW its idiom is backwards from what would be best for the programmer in the typical project. The other signs have been... every live codebase using every previous method of dealing with JS & node's async patterns. "Callback hell", the very common pattern of using promises to wrangle async code into acting synchronous, and now "await", comically, prefacing more async calls than not.