Macros, regex, awk are the tools to quickly automate text processing. It literally takes less than two minutes in most cases once you’re proficient.
And when your awk script grows into something that doesn’t produce the final output, but has to be run in another interpreter first in order to produce the final result, then you created your custom language.
It’s not the thing you should do if you need to do it repeatedly, like once a day or even once a month.
This all depends on a lot of circumstances, and its hard to calculate time for implementing a script vs doing it by hand for a future you don’t know yet.