> it always blows my mind that so few people really know how to use it at a decent level

Not nearly as surprising as it is to me that now that most developers have forgotten perl, they're turning to awk as an inspiring example of a bygone era.

Seriously: perl basically replaced awk in the mid-90's. It absorbed all the great lessons and added two or three dozen innovations. But it had scary syntax, so everyone used python (which did not replace awk very effectively) and forgot perl. So now we're back at awk. And the scary syntax is all in the Rust world.