What a bloated mess. This is clearly the second system syndrome, described in the Mystical Man-month.
In good old times futures were macros on top of delay and force special forms, and explicit message passing a-la Erlang would do the job.
If they had taken more ideas from C# (especially ExecutionContexts), a lot of his complaints would fade away. He actually explicitly calls this out towards the bottom of the essay.
Async, await and friends are mere standardized kludges - popular syntactic sugar without clear semantics and real world connection (explicit message passing mimics how biological systems do self-regulation).
So called enterprise languages, especially C++ are full of similar stuff (kludges).
Uhh... the point of them is that its as close to the semantics of synchronous code as possible. That's the 'real world connection' - your single threaded code can become asynchonous with just a few keyword changes. Rather than "sendRequest()" you do "await sendRequest()".
It's clear that the async story stumbled into a tarpit after that, but I would be very surprised if it wasn't straightened out eventually into a clean syntax & implementation.
Although it will undoubtedly take longer than anyone would like to deprecate the crufty bits.
Oh, and it is mythical, not mystical.