[fiiv]

In 7.2.x, you could do async await with just a --harmony flag.

[eknkc]

I might be mistaken but I believe there were some major performance issues with the older async/await implementation.

[ronjouch]

Indeed, a memory leak: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/9339 / https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/detail?id=5582

[egeozcan]

Yes, on the other hand, if you are like me and use them for one-off scripts, they are great.