> Pretty sure a callback vs synchronous style of coding is a little more than syntactic sugar

Absolutely, asynchronous and synchronous are two very different patterns when programming with very different trade offs for both of them, but async/await is not synchronous, it only make that particular call _look_ synchronous, while actually being asynchronous.

Failing to understand that async/await is just syntactic sugar for dealing with asynchronous programming will sooner or later bite you.

Here is a gist that shows why async/await is not really synchronous (blocking) programming: https://gist.github.com/matt-mcalister/3f060bf32d292cfebc944...