My gut told me calling an async function from the setTimeout callback was a bad thing. Since the setTimeout machinery ignores the return value of the function, there is no way it was awaiting on it. This means that there will be an unhandled promise. An unhandled promise could mean problems if the function called in the callback takes a long time to complete or throws an error.

but has a critical difference: the expression console.log("before 2"); does not and cannot depend on the resolved value result. The throw propagates through all chained promises, and when it stops, there is no remaining undefined behavior! No piece of code is left in an unclear state, and therefore there is no reason to crash.

The power of await is that it lets you write asynchronous code using synchronous language constructs.

I refactored quite a bit of tarball-fetcher now to use actual Promises and asyncawait instead of passing resolve / reject callbacks around. This makes the code quite a bit easier to follow in my opinion, but let me know if anything should be changed there.