I think a lot of people underestimate awk or aren't aware of its capabilities - I used it quite a lot when I was new in my career before really understanding it

I think a lot of people underestimate awk or aren't aware of its capabilities - I used it quite a lot when I was new in my career before really understanding it. There's enough awk snippets floating around that you'll see it in folks' toolkits next to sed & grep even though they're just using a couple preset scripts. I didn't really understand what it was capable of until I had a colleague use it to parse the output a CLI tool with no actual reasonable machine-readable output - something like a 100 line awk script to turn some hardware vendor's joke of a config tool into output that could be piped into another script. That's when I understood what awk was, and that my colleague might have been the devil.