Node lets you cheat with "synchronous" APIs: it stops the whole event loop. If you start making exceptions for "little" bits of IO like printing to the console

Node lets you cheat with "synchronous" APIs: it stops the whole event loop. If you start making exceptions for "little" bits of IO like printing to the console or reading files, the async parts of your code are "async when someone hasn't done something synchronous". Doing a `readFileSync` even on a small file in a hot code path means you're meaningfully tanking the performance of your code. What you're asking for is "stop running my code until I've finished printing to the console". That's what the `.await` does. Synchronous IO on `print()` would mean _everything in the whole application that logs_ suddenly blocks the whole application from doing _anything_ while the console is being written to, not just the currently running code. If you want synchronous stop-the-world IO (like Python, where async/await is bolted on), you shouldn't choose a language based around async/await concurrency.