Author mentions that async/await messes up with mental model of the code, and I think that's the most important issue with it, but it goes even deeper than described in the article.

There are no inherently async or sync functions. It's not a property of a function, rather the property of what caller does after calling a function.

Is throwing a ball an async or sync action? Well, if tennis robot machine spits one ball after another and doesn't care/wait about feedback – then it's async. If the tennis player hits the ball with a racket and puts all her/his attention into waiting/validating the result (essentially blocking) – then it's synchronous function. It's essentially an "attention" of the caller that defines sync or async.

Marking code as inherently "sync" or "async" or claiming that one functions are "hard" and others are "easy" is the single dumbest idea I've seen in computer programming. And it's insane how contagious it is - seems like languages are more often copypasting features from other, instead of designing from the first principles.