>working with its output is now also async, you cannot 'wait' for it ... , 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

Asynchronicity is something that Node makes explicit and necessary for I/O, and it's practically a core principle of Node and javascript. If you try to avoid asynchronicity entirely, then you're not going to get much further than you would if you tried to avoid classes in Java.

Async/await is a very useful syntax sugar to working with promises, but it's not built to let you ignore asynchronicity entirely.