Async/await is often called syntactic sugar over promises. How do you understand this expression? What does 'syntactic sugar' mean?

The term "syntactic sugar" refers to improvements in the syntax of a programming language that make the code more readable and convenient but do not add new functionality. In the context of async/await, it means that async/await is a more convenient and understandable way to work with promises, hiding the complexity of chains of .then() and .catch().

Essentially, async/await is a wrapper around promises that allows writing asynchronous code in a synchronous style using the keywords async and await. This simplifies reading and maintaining the code, but under the hood, promises still work.

Example with promises:

fetchData()
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(data);
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error);
  });

The same with async/await:

async function getData() {
  try {
    const response = await fetchData();
    const data = await response.json();
    console.log(data);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
}

Thus, async/await is syntactic sugar that makes working with promises more convenient and similar to regular sequential code.