Promises don't cover a lot of scenarios in async usage. When building some node apps, especially toolage, doing everything async just isn't possible, or is a lot more work for little benefit. The second you use a promise, anywhere, working with its output is now also async, you cannot 'wait' for it. I don't know if async/await actually does this or not, but until that functionality exists in JS, working with node, for me, is a pile of junk code, especially when libraries force you to use them asynchronously.