This article about async in Python helped me understand it pretty well, since it explains them in terms of coroutines, which are very intuitive for me: https://mleue.com/posts/yield-to-async-await/
Another thing that helps me get it is comparing it to the continuation passing style, where you never return from a function, you just take an argument that's basically a function pointer bound to an environment, and at the end of the function, instead of returning, you call your input function, giving it another function and environment as input, repeating the cycle. It's very similar to the transformation of callbacks within callbacks within callbacks pattern in JavaScript to the async/await pattern.