You are right. It's just that multithreading before free-threading was too broken and too slow to the point that very few people use them for high-traffic production things. And people decided to write it like NodeJS to further handwave the problem.

There are real advantages to the async/await pattern, eloquently expressed in Glyph's Unyielding essay: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2014/02/unyielding.html

Python is a multi-paradigm language so I'm not against making virtual threads (aka green threads) built in. But I don't think they really address the problems that the async/await approach solves. It's really hard to write multi-threaded code correctly without something like Rust's type system.