Promises/thenables gave people the time to get used to the idea of deferred evaluation via a familiar callback approach... Then when async/await came along, people didn't see it as a radically new feature but more as syntactic sugar to do what they were already doing in a more succinct way without callbacks.

People in the Node.js community were very aware of async concepts since the beginning and put a lot of effort in not blocking the event loop. So Promises and then async/await were seen as solutions to existing pain points which everyone was already familiar with. A lot of people refactored their existing code to async/await.