The complaint really is that if everything is sequential it is a fault in the language to make you explicitly say it every time, not that await is somehow worse than promises.
I don't believe this is a language specific choice, they could have done the same with C#
I'm not seeing a benefit by wrapping almost every single command in 'await $`...`'. I get why you'd want to wrap Bash in a different language, especially when handling numbers. But I'd rather use something like Python than this verbose trickery.