I disagree. What you're arguing, in effect, is that async/await is bad because you should handle asynchronous APIs by taking a synchronous API and running it in a different thread, which experience has generally shown to be a recipe for buggy code, inefficient code, or most likely both.

The underlying idea behind async/await is that synchronous methods shouldn't exist in the first place--you'd only have the asynchronous API. Async/await enhances that model by turning the promises' functional interface (which requires interesting binding to handle loops/recursion) back into an imperative control interface.