It is my understanding that the entire point of the async/await sugar in any language is to explicitly take away the appearance of multithreading/concurrency/parallelism in code. I often see the argument for async/await syntax as being made in the following way, it is not natural or feasible to reason about concurrent and multithreaded code, programmers need to be able to reason about all code as though it were a linear list of instructions no matter what is going on with the implementation, therefore, we need the async/await syntax to enable linear, straight line code appearance for programmer benefit. While I do not agree that doing so is at all a good thing, it is the most prevelant argument I have seen in justifying async/await style sugar. If I am right and this is the primary motivation for adding this to a language, your comment is in direct opposition to the entire point of such constructs. Using this reasoning, I think the author was doing as suggested and writing multithreaded code as though it was just a non threaded imperative program.

Note: I don’t really disagree with your view, but it seems that view is in the minority.