Comment by throwaway17_17

I’d say that the point of async/await is to create a syntax demarcation between functions which may suspend themselves (or be suspended by a supervisory system) and those functions that process through completely and cannot be suspended (particularly by a supervisory system). The means to enable the suspension of computation and allow other computations to proceed following that suspension are implementation details.

So, having an async function run on a separate thread from those functions that are synchronous seems a viable way to achieve the underlying goal of continuous processing in the face of computations that involve waiting for some resource to become available.

I will agree that inspired by C#’s originating and then JavaScripts popularization of the syntax, it is not a stretch to assume async/await is implemented with an event loop (since both languages use such for implementation).