Task hanging during asynchronous execution in Grunt

Grunt tasks that perform asynchronous operations rely on the this.async() method to signal completion to the runtime. When this method is invoked, Grunt pauses the task queue until the returned callback function is executed.

A challenge arises when an asynchronous operation fails to trigger its callback due to an unhandled exception or a lost network response. Because Grunt lacks a native global timeout mechanism for these callbacks, the process remains active indefinitely, blocking all subsequent tasks in the queue.

Given this behavior in Grunt 1.x, how can a developer implement a reliable timeout for a specific async task to prevent the entire build pipeline from hanging? Is there a recommended pattern to ensure the task queue continues if the this.async() callback is never reached?