This mentality leads to systems that are a mess of callbacks, don't scale, and practically impossible to maintain.

You could make the same argument about SQL databases. Why do you need to understand their architecture, learn arcane SQL syntax, and learn to operate them? Instead, your program could write and read files directly from disk. But you still choose to use the DB as it has hundreds of man-years invested in it and gives you a higher level of abstraction.

Think about SWF and its newest incarnation in the form of temporal.io as a higher-level way to write task orchestrations. It requires some learning but allows you immediately to leverage dozens of man-years invested in the technology.