💬 How async/await finally made sense to me

Async and await confused me for weeks because every explanation started with the syntax and skipped the problem. The problem is simple. Things like an API call or a database query take time, and if JavaScript waited for each one, the whole page would freeze. So it starts the slow task, keeps running the rest of the code, and deals with the result when it arrives. A Promise is just the name for that result that has not arrived yet. It ends up with data, or it fails with an error. Before async and await we wrote long chains of then and catch, and the code read like a staircase. With async and await you write it top to bottom like normal code, and wrap it in try and catch for errors. The word await only pauses that one function, not the page. The mistake almost everyone makes is forgetting await, then printing the Promise and wondering why it says pending. What worked for me was taking one old then chain from a project and rewriting it. It clicks fast after that. If you are stuck on a case, post it here and I will try to help.

Page freezing if JavaScript waited for every call, that finally made it click for me. When I started I used await inside forEach and wondered why nothing waited. A for of loop with await fixed it, and it took me an evening to understand why. Could you add a short Promise.all example for parallel calls in a follow up?

The forgetting await mistake got me in my first project. I printed a Promise and saw the word pending. I spent an hour thinking the server was broken. It was just my missing word. One more thing that confused me was that await usually only works inside an async function, so the error looked random. Reading the error message twice fixed more bugs for me than any tutorial.

Really helpful explanation, thank you, you clearly explained the actual problem behind async/await instead of just teaching syntax. The Promise example makes it much easier for beginners to understand.