Why does the Promise constructor need an executor?

This is called the revealing constructor pattern coined by Domenic.

Basically, the idea is to give you access to parts of an object while that object is not fully constructed yet. Quoting Domenic:

I call this the revealing constructor pattern because the Promise constructor is revealing its internal capabilities, but only to the code that constructs the promise in question. The ability to resolve or reject the promise is only revealed to the constructing code, and is crucially not revealed to anyone using the promise. So if we hand off p to another consumer, say

The past

Initially, promises worked with deferred objects, this is true in the Twisted promises JavaScript promises originated in. This is still true (but often deprecated) in older implementations like Angular's $q, Q, jQuery and old versions of bluebird.

The API went something like:

var d = Deferred();
d.resolve(); 
d.reject();
d.promise; // the actual promise

It worked, but it had a problem. Deferreds and the promise constructor are typically used for converting non-promise APIs to promises. There is a "famous" problem in JavaScript called Zalgo - basically, it means that an API must be synchronous or asynchronous but never both at once.

The thing is - with deferreds it's possible to do something like:

function request(param) {
   var d = Deferred();
   var options = JSON.parse(param);
   d.ajax(function(err, value) { 
      if(err) d.reject(err);
      else d.resolve(value);
   });
}

There is a hidden subtle bug here - if param is not a valid JSON this function throws synchronously, meaning that I have to wrap every promise returning function in both a } catch (e) { and a .catch(e => to catch all errors.

The promise constructor catches such exceptions and converts them to rejections which means you never have to worry about synchronous exceptions vs asynchronous ones with promises. (It guards you on the other side by always executing then callbacks "in the next tick").

In addition, it also required an extra type every developer has to learn about where the promise constructor does not which is pretty nice.

FYI, if you're dying to use the deferred interface rather than the Promise executor interface despite all the good reasons against the deferred interface, you can code one trivially once and then use it everywhere (personally I think it's a bad idea to code this way, but your volume of questions on this topic suggests you think differently, so here it is):

function Deferred() {
    var self = this;
    var p = this.promise = new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
        self.resolve = resolve;
        self.reject = reject;
    });
    this.then = p.then.bind(p);
    this.catch = p.catch.bind(p);
    if (p.finally) {
        this.finally = p.finally.bind(p);
    }
}

Now, you can use the interface you seem to be asking for:

var d = new Deferred();
d.resolve(); 
d.reject();
d.promise;     // the actual promise
d.then(...)    // can use .then() on either the Deferred or the Promise
d.promise.then(...)

Here a slightly more compact ES6 version:

function Deferred() {
    const p = this.promise = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        this.resolve = resolve;
        this.reject = reject;
    });
    this.then = p.then.bind(p);
    this.catch = p.catch.bind(p);
    if (p.finally) {
        this.finally = p.finally.bind(p);
    }
}

---

Or, you can do what you asked for in your question using this Deferred() constructor:

var request = new Deferred();
request.resolve();
request.then(handleSuccess, handleError);

But, it has the downsides pointed out by Benjamin and is not considered the best way to code promises.

Something similar shown here on MDN.