He looked pretty ok with async/await (which uses Promises under the hood), one of the advertised features of his new project is top level await.
I just don't see how this workaround is the correct solution. Just saying that's it's generally a bad idea is not enough for me. At some point there will come a time when you want to treat a file as a function, and when that day comes you will want async/await at the top level.