c-baby’s suggestion wraps a non-promise in a promise, so I don’t see how that’s still able to return a non-promise.

Awaiting plain values can only be done inside an async function, which means it returns a promise, which means you have to wait for the event loop to get the value out of there.

Generally I’m not aware of any other (reasonably ergonomic) way to write a single code path that can work with both sync and async input without itself always giving async output.