> Why all those other attempts to explain async/await don't just say this I can't imagine.

On one hand, the people who write explanations are usually those who have lived through a language's history and learned things gradually, and also have context of how things were solved (or not) before a feature was introduced.

On the other hand, the people who are looking for an explanation, are usually just jumping directly to the latest version of the language, and lack a lot of that context.

Then those who do the explaining underestimate how much their explanations are relying on that prior context.

That's why I think the ideal person to explain something to you, is someone with an experience as similar as possible to your own, but also knows about the thing that you want to know about. Because this way they will use terms similar to those you would use yourself. Even if those terms are imprecise or technically incorrect, they would still help you in actually understanding, because those explanations would actually be building on top of your current knowledge, or close to it.

This is also why all monad explanations are... uh... like that.