It's funny. I started with Flash, thus Action Script as a designer and evented programming felt so natural to me, especially the observer pattern, so much that I had issues when dealing with thread safety in Java.

Great for solving the typical problems encountered in a web browser.

But a real fucked up mental model to bake into an entire industry’s worth of developers

To me this seems overexaggerated. Most people I went to university with already struggled to understand async code, without having done web development before. And for those with web development background it was pretty easy to adjust.

I also don't know any school, college or university that starts their programming courses in a webbrowser. Typical languages in Germany for a first semester algorithms/data structures class are either Java or C++.

By entire industry I mean web developers, which is a cohort that usually has more non-traditional educations and tends to think in a async mental model.

What you explained happens in Germany is pretty par for the course in the US as well for CS degrees. But even then, why the hell are we throwing a book of data structures at students? You don’t give an apprentice framer a nail gun and say “go at it!”. They’ll destroy everything. You give them a hammer and educate them when they start to complain of smashed thumbs

Where do we use it where it isn’t needed? async/await syntax is much nicer than callbacks or promises. Maybe you’re talking about the old ways.