Sounds like you're mixing concurrency with parallelism.

Further, sounds like you never had to maintain legacy code that uses callbacks or promises.

Promises came as syntactic sugar to solve the callback hell, and asyn/await solves the confuseness that nested promises create, along with some performance improvements.

If it's so annoying for you, go back to writing callbacks: I can assure you that it won't take you long until you start banging your head against the closest wall...