Great article, but don't just abandon async entirely. There are still use cases. For me: I use it to pull data from several external APIs all at once. That data is then married up to produce another data object with some special sauce computation. All of these network calls run in parallel, therefore the network overhead (DNS lookups, SSL handshakes, etc.) all operate at the same time instead of running one after the other if it were in synchronous mode. IIRC the benchmarks for this went from running at 3 minutes+ to just over 20 seconds.
So there's still utility, so YMMV.