i keep thinking that all of these callbacks might be better organized in, like, a state machine or something instead of just pyramiding out to the right

all of your event callbacks could then just look up what the current state is, and invoke the corresponding state transition function attached to it

@KitRedgrave async / await makes this a bit better in javascript

BUT STILL

the right answer is to have coroutines (ideally by delimited continuations) in a way that's much more cleanly baked into the language

Racket / Guile do this in a sane way. async stuff can be made completely clean and look like everyday straightahead coding.

Every time I program in javascript I get so angry because of this.