If you use them with a multithreaded executor (eg in Go), of course they interleave executions. I suppose all your green threads / fibers could run on a single CPU core. But what's the point? How would that be an improvement over what we have now?
I suppose you could make something similar to async/await but with a yield() operation whenever a call wants to block. This would allow blocking read() and so on. But its basically async/await but without declaring functions as async. And without needing to explicitly await. Await points would be implicit and invisible. But if you do that, any function call you make could yield before returning. As a result, you could no longer easily reason about interleaving. I call foo(). Does it yield to other threads before returning? I have no idea. I could read the code of foo(), but maybe foo will change between minor versions of the library.
This would lead to an avalanche of bugs. Lots of javascript code quietly depends on the lack of interleaving for correctness. Javascript guarantees that while my (non async) function runs, no other code gets executed. Adding threads, even if its via cooperative multitasking, would break that invariant. It would break all sorts of programs which are working correctly today.
> The latter re-invents the universe. [...] Thinking about it, the change is possibly smaller than language changes required by async/await.
Did you write much javascript before async/await and before promises? Javascript at the time was already async. We just implemented async execution through callbacks. ("Callback hell"). Over time, functions tended to go down and to the right. Promises were added as 3rd party libraries. Then promises were standardised. And later, async/await was added as syntax to help you work with promises. Async / await in javascript was an incremental change to give us new syntax to do what we were already doing. JS already had an event loop and promises. Async/await just added syntax.
Threads (cooperative or preemptive) would be a massive change to JS. It would cause an endless parade of bugs, and frozen websites. To say nothing of your notion we could casually reinvent DOM events. That ship sailed a long time ago.
> The only difference is that one of them clutters your syntax and the other doesn't.
One of them is explicit about where and when a thread blocks. Whether or not something is "blocking" (async) is part of the API. Threading (incl cooperative threading) hides this information. Personally, I much prefer this information to be explicit. I need to know as a programmer whether or not execution will be interleaved.