As for on the server, no. Sqlite is a c library, not a separate application- the work happens inside the node process. Regardless of how you do it, any call into sqlite is going to block. Adding promises or callbacks on top of that is just wasting CPU cycles, unlike reading from the filesystem or making a network request, where the work is offloaded to a process outside of node (and hence why it makes sense to let node do other things instead of waiting).

In fact, if you synchronously read and write within a single function with no awaits or timeouts in-between, you don't have to worry about atomicity- no other request is being handled in the meantime.