I use Node a lot, and I find myself reaching for the async library any time the project reaches a non-trivial size and there's a lot of communication going on between services. I don't find it all that hard to read (the async.waterfall method looks somewhat like promises chaining) I suppose I should spend a weekend or two steeping myself in promises and es7. It's mildly annoying to have to learn a new async paradigm every couple years, and like others have pointed out, the Node core hasn't changed - its still callbacks.