I really feel that's this is just inherent to async/await model, you can only put so much lipstick on a pig.

Light threads + messaging (whether proper like Erlang or bastardized like Go) feels like far superior model for concurrency in near-all cases and also easier to write and reason about (series of "functions" sending messages looks very similar to serial code) but I'd imagine it would be very hard to make convenient in GC-less language