Comment by MrJohz

Sure you can. An `async` function in Javascript is essentially a completely normal function that returns a promise. The `async`/`await` syntax is a convenient syntax sugar for working with promises, but the issue would still exist if it didn't exist.

More to the point, the issue would still exist even if promises didn't exist — a lot of Node APIs originally used callbacks and a continuation-passing style approach to concurrency, and that had exactly the same issues.