The background connection used in `actions.js` was being promisified
in specific actions. Instead it's now promisified once. This was made
possible by changes in `pify` v5.0.0 that ensure the binding works
correctly when passing in an object to `pify` (e.g. the `this` value
is correctly set to the wrapped background connection).
This async background connection has been temporarily assigned to a
separate variable, until we can transition all of our actions to using
this. This was done to reduce the size of this PR. There are a lot of
actions.