I found that it's not straight forward to filter a list of values of promises, so I tried the approach in this question (top answer).

The difference is, i'm using this inside useEffect in React.

My results array is empty outside of the async getData function:

// helper function
async function filter(arr, callback) {
  const fail = Symbol();
  return (
    await Promise.all(arr.map(async (item) => ((await callback(item)) ? item : fail)))
  ).filter((i) => i !== fail);
}

useEffect(() => {
      if (!stateData) {
        let results = [];

        async function getData() {
          const res = await filter(data.slice(0, 5), async (item) => {
            const boolRes = await myAsyncFunction(item);
            return boolRes;
          });
          // results has data 
          results.push(...res);
        }
        getData();
        console.log(results) // is empty, but results inside getData has data
      }
  }, []);

any idea how I can pull the data out of getData safely?