Figured it out:
Events events events!
i had a foreach loop that was playing all animations in the list, where what i needed was to play the first animation, and then have an event called “play next animation” that was called on a timelines finish!
This is obviously not a robust way of playing animations, but with some extra work, and going all in with events, it can work nicely i think.
PS. I am still unclear as how execution is handled in this case, as when i had the loop, things were DEFINITELY asynchronous.