Not a fan of async in other languages (I avoid it in rust and python like the plague), but it feels like a straight upgrade in JS. I’ve never once regretted its addition. In my experience it’s extremely rare for things to get more complicated than an await followed by a Promise.all(). Unhandled rejections are super obvious to a human as performing a .then() chain is uncommon in the days of await. And linters will pick it up if you miss it. Function coloring isn’t an issue as all of the Node stdlib that I’ve seen provides async functionality (back in the day you could accidentally call a synchronous file system operation and break the event loop). You end up with everything returning a promise except for some business logic at the leafs of the dependency graph. A Node app is mostly i/o anyway, thus the functions mostly return Promises. The await keyword is homomorphic across promises and other values. And type checking (who isn’t using typescript?) will catch most API changes where something becomes async. I can’t say it’s perfect, but it’s really not a problem for me.