Hacker News Reader

I agree with you but FWIW there are both big (Bluebird) and small (pinky-promise) packages to promisify stuff.

Callback hell isn't the characteristic of having a callback-based API. It's the code you get when you try to compose it and conditionally fork it without any better abstractions.

So promisifying a callback-based API does address it by either letting you use a yield/await abstraction or at the very least promise composition.

Wrapping a callback-based API is such a mechanical process that you can wrap entire modules at a time, so I'm not sure what's hellish about that when it gives you promises, something you can actually work with.

promise-ring is one library that does the wrapping automatically from node-style callbacks to promises. I think Bluebird also has an auto-wrapper.