Your one liner doesn’t do the same thing as the code I posted. You missed passing a callback to stream.write and waiting for the callback before exiting the process.

Once we await that callback to resolve, then the buffered data from before that point is known to be flushed. I don’t want to wait for a “finished” event because I want my program to terminate once my main() function and a flush after main() is complete. If I wait for finish, a background “thread” can extend the process lifetime by continuing to log.

This is also why we don’t set process.exitCode and wait for the event loop to drain and Node to auto-exit. That might be the “right way”, but if someone leaves a lingering setTimeout(…, 10_MINUTES) you’ll have a bad time.

It’s also more clear to reason about. Our rule: if you want the process to wait for your async work to complete, then `await` it.