I remember debating this when async/await support was first coming out. My opinion was (and still is) that it would have been better to make "await" the default

I remember debating this when async/await support was first coming out. My opinion was (and still is) that it would have been better to make "await" the default behavior and have a separate "noawait" keyword for those rare cases when you actually really want the promise instead of the value.