>In my experience people complain about it because they are coming from a blocking first mindset. They're trying to shoehorn async calls into an inherently synchronous structure.

There's no "inherently synchronous structure", at least not in Javascript. The nature is synchronous, asynchronous is an illusion built on top of it. Which is why you can easily block an "asynchronous" program:

  while (true) {} 

on any async function will do.

JavaScript execution is synchronous on a single call stack. That's why they added Workers which is different to async.

Rust's Tokio and co are also blocking. You need threads to get something that's not an inherently synchronous with merely a facade or cooperative asychronicity.