Indeed, I've noticed that quite a few -Sync methods aren't documented anymore. My hope is that node will have a major release which removes all -Sync methods and replaces callbacks with Promises. Then we'll all be happy and use cluster when we can.
Yes, if I'm writing a web server I want everything to be async. But, just as I want to share JS on the server and the client I also want to use JS as my build language. At least for me, I find it much faster to build using a sync style.
Maybe I just haven't learned the async way but for example I tried to make a build system using node. I needed to spawn out to a builder to build some stuff, copy files, spawn git in various ways to see if repos are dirty or clean, git add, git commit, and a few other things. I found it a massive nightmare and after 2 days I switched to synchronous python for my building. Was done in 2 hours.
If there's some articles or tips that will make me as comfortable at async for building as I'm as sync in python then please point me at them. But, for whatever reason, I'm struggling with async for really complex tasks. (and yes, I'm using promises)
If you really prefer synchronous style, and don't mind the drawbacks, there are plenty of languages out there that'll work better for you. PHP, Ruby, and Python readily come to mind.
For example use a global object called State that contains information about the list of build tasks to be run and the state of each of the stages for the tasks.
I suppose though that you could always just call process.exit() when a callback was called or a promise resolved. Personally I'd love a file-level await statement.