To be clear: I like that about it too. But in the real world, we want tooling that does more stuff. In the mid-90's, "everyone" knew perl, because it was the best choice for problems in this space. And in a world where everyone knows perl, there is no place for awk.

But now we live in a world where no one knows perl, and languages like python and javascript are clumsy and weird in this space. And that makes awk look clever and elegant.

All I'm saying is that in perl-world (which was a real place!), awk wasn't clever and elegant, it was stale and primitive. And that to me is more surprising than awk's cleverness.