I feel it should have been called out explicitly when introducing await, because the 'clean' solution in async/await code is to call each async function and then await the results where you need them - which is a pattern he doesn't hint at at all.
The async article linked from this article has a toy example for this concept where the result is unused, but most of the time you would be passing the result somewhere. If you were using typescript it could fail at compile time when you try to pass a promise instead of the expected type. Even if you're not, you should notice it never work in your tests.
Still, I think it is easiest to never mess up if you await as soon as you have a promise value. In many common cases this is easy enough.
const userPromise = fetchUser(id)
const itemPromise = fetchItem(itemId)
// Do stuff, maybe even more async stuff
const item = await itemPromise
const user = await userPromise