> Sounds like a worse way of writing async requests,

It's just how it works under the hood, this complexity is quickly abstracted and actually it's how a lot of async requests are implemented, it's just here it's on 1 tcp connection.

> , while the last part is basically what websockets seem to be intended for

yes I was specifically answering that :

> I have seen teams of experienced seniors using websockets and then just sending requests/responses over them as every architecture choice and design pattern they were familiar with required this.

i.e people using websocket like normal http request.