I'm still confused why people would use a backtracking regex engine in cases when they don't need recursive regex extensions (or other questionable extensions l

I'm still confused why people would use a backtracking regex engine in cases when they don't need recursive regex extensions (or other questionable extensions like back references). A "correct" (from the CS perspective) regex engine wouldn't have had this or many other problems that people encounter when doing regular expression matching. If they had piped out to sed or awk this wouldn't have happened, since GNU grep, sed and awk use a proper regex engine.