I just the other day had to step in to deal with a race condition in a frontend caused by improperly handling async API requests.

It's dangerous to assume that just because JS has a single main thread that you don't need to think about sequencing of operations and locking.

While writing async code can indeed be challenging, I just disagree with the idea that JavaScript is lacking good "locking primitives":

> All this async code without decent locking primitives is leading to a rabbit hole of race conditions...

No, it's not. Here's a lock:

   let lock = Promise.resolve()
   // ...
   lock = lock.then(() => { /* critical section */ })

For the rare instances where more complex async flow control is required, there are a bunch of libraries for that (e.g. async[0], p-queue[1], etc.).

[0] https://caolan.github.io/async/v3/docs.html

[1] https://github.com/sindresorhus/p-queue