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Not sure this problem goes away by giving names to anonymous functions, which seems to be his suggestion

Agreed. It tags the complexity with identifiers, which is of some use, but it doesn't change anything about the execution path which can still get wildly out of hand.

Nop, but it can be a bit better by using predefined functions rather than inline ones.

Probably better, but the callback hell stems from a broken up control flow; where we cannot read / understand what's going on with a linear (top to bottom) scan of the source code (even for small sections of code).

I think programming where we have state and things can happen at any time, where programs wait for events or something similar has proven to be difficult to write/understand/maintain. The 30+ years it has taken to write the (unfinished) Herd micro-kernel is a good example.

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