This might sound weird to you, the first thing that comes to mind is: 'Eslint will tell me to remove the await, there is no need for an await after a return'

But the case is a different when we wrap our promise in a try/catch.

async function foo() {
  try {
    return await waitAndMaybeReject();
  } catch (e) {
    return 'caught';
  }
}

This also applies when we don't need to return resolved value of the promise, we always need to await it if the returned promise is inside a try/catch and we want to catch the error.

By returning a promise, we’re deferring its result, so our catch block never runs.
This also happens, when not awaiting a promise (regardless if we return or not).

Only outside of try/catch blocks, return await is redundant. There’s even an Eslint rule, but this rule allows a return if it's in try/catch.

Bonus🔥

If you want to print something after a return statement, instead of temporaraly creating a variable, printing and then returning, like this:

async function foo() {
  const res = await fetch();
  console.log('after fetch')
  return res;
} 

We can wrap the return with a try and finallly (unless you need to print the resolved value of the promise of course), like so:

async function foo() {
  try {
    return await fetch();
  } finally {
    console.log('after fetch')
  }
}