late reply. I've sort of experimented with async iterators and using pipeline() to pipe them together and it seems to work out for the most part; not sure what is awkward about them, I mean consume with an async iter on the source passed as an arg and you can throw at any time to kill it with an error. In fact I find the new async generator transforms easier and more ergonomic. in terms of event emitters. I can just use `await once(emiter, 'event');` now. Not sure how .on would be expected to work outside of it being some kind of async iterator.

I mean, I don't mind using util.promisify or just importing the "to be" xyz/promises paths. The code exists clearly, either behind a symbol or otherwise.

Of course. It’s just new to users, relatively; only since 2019. To boot, one of the current LTS versions -the oldest- does not include it

I agree with you that it would be nice if more of core supported promises, but I think there are probably plenty of examples of them keeping up with the times or charging ahead as well. Top-level await and optional chaining are a couple features that come to mind.