> it defensively defers execution any time it encounters one
That's a (bad) JS design choice, for example C# doesn't do this. Actually I'm pretty sure even in JS, async/await gets transpiled to state machines, so I think this is easily fixable by shipping a new transpiler implementation that only defers when necessary.
I get your point, but I don't think we should go back to oldschool yield-based iterators to hack around a broken implementation.