[olalonde]

> It just seems like people added a ton of complexity to give up a few keystrokes.

It's either "only syntactic sugar" or it "added a ton of complexity". To be honest, you sound like someone who's bitter because all the hard stuff you had to learn to deal with is now super simple and intuitive.

> I like JavaScript's concurrency model (single threaded with callbacks) so I don't see any benefit to the async stuff.

This sentence also demonstrates you either don't understand the concurrency model or async/await (async/await doesn't change the concurrency model).

The syntactic sugar isn't only there to save keystrokes, it also makes code easier to read and is less prone to errors.