The fundamental design of native Promises is to represent values over time, not to manage the lifecycle of the underlying operation. This lack of an "ownership" model means there is no built-in mechanism for a parent scope to enforce cancellation or cleanup on its child processes, causing leaks.
Simple concurrency helpers or custom promise chains fail in production. Robust systems need a "runtime contract" that enforces strict rules like concurrency limits, retry policies with backoff, and automatic cancellation of related tasks. This ensures predictable behavior and prevents cascading failures.
Developers often assume `Promise.race` terminates losing operations, but it doesn't. The "losing" promises continue running in the background, consuming resources, incurring API costs, and leaving orphaned processes that require manual cleanup, unlike a true ownership model which would handle cancellation.