The grep/cut replacement is exactly what I use awk the most for. I use it for other things too but this stands out. awk just fixes the problem when you need to

The grep/cut replacement is exactly what I use awk the most for. I use it for other things too but this stands out. awk just fixes the problem when you need to have more than one field from the input and maybe a different string between them. I guess this can be done with cut too, but for me it's simpler this way. Also I use awk often in scripts together with fzf to interactively switch contexts e.g. in cloud provider CLIs.