That's not actually right. An async function will always return a promise, so if you return a promise directly it's indeed pretty much the same as if you return a promise that waits on that promise; it's the calling function that actually awaits on the returned promise.
The main difference would be error handling: if you have a catch block that returns a different value, returning the promise directly would actually throw in the calling function, whereas if you "return await", it's going to get caught in your catch block, resolving the promise to your own custom value.
