Is async/await a step back to JavaScript?

So the author rejects what is basically syntactic sugar around the Promises because it _looks_ _like_ imperative programming, even though it's 100% promises, and makes the code cleaner to read and easier to understand?

It reminds me when object oriented programming was the trend of the day, and people got crazy about it. Every bit of code just had to be OO, and people would rewrite everything, including operating systems and network stacks. It was crazy because OO had become not a means to and end, but an end in itself.

Sometimes I feel like we are back at it again, but with functional programming.