I think a few things are simultaneously true here:

1. async/await is a huge improvement over callbacks.

2. doing asynchronous programming through callbacks has always been a messy hack, primarily coming from languages that couldn't/wouldn't do real concurrency in their runtimes and async/await just papers over it without fixing the fundamental problems

3. threads are a lot more elegant from a language design standpoint and a lot more powerful, but..

4. .. I would much rather fuss with what color my function needs to be than deal with the average concurrency bug that results from threads.