Just out of curiosity, why awk? I've only ever used it for simple text splitting and didn't really know people did more with it. Is it a tool worth learning?
Brian Kernighan mentions in the book that awk provides "the most bang for the programming buck of any language--one can learn much of it in 5 or 10 minutes, and typical programs are only a few lines long" [p. 116, UNIX: A History and Memoir]. Also keep in mind Larry Wall's (inventor of Perl) famous quote/signature line: "I still say awk '{print $1}' a lot."
More background on awk from Brian Kernighan in a 2015 talk on language design: https://youtu.be/Sg4U4r_AgJU?t=19m45s
In a way, awk, like sed, cut(1), paste(1), comm(1) is closer to the original Unix design philosophy of pipeline composition of simple, single function tools. cut, paste, and comm are simple, single function. sed is programmable, and awk even more so, but they're still optimized for being used in pipelines. Perl still has lots of options designed for pipeline usage (-p, -n, -a, -0, -F), but was always capable of doing general purpose programming, and python is primarily general purpose programming.
Personally, I've never learned sed, cut, paste, or comm; the only traditional text processing tools I use are sort & uniq. I know awk, but the one time I wanted to use it in the last 5 years in an official script, I was shouted down by confused youngsters. I use perl for one liners, and python for any nontrivial scripting.
I once wrote code with curl, awk, sed, jq, xargs and in less than 30 lines implemented something that would have taken about 200 lines of go code. I did it too in less than an hour when I was told it would take a day. It was urgent and I needed the result fast.
There are different kind of hammers, different kind of nails and screws. Know your tools, use them when it's called for. You can use a wrench as a hammer, doesn't make it a great one.
For a long while I maintained a program that took the compiler output (intermediate form) from one toolchain, and converted it to another (intermediate form).
Why awk? It was faster, and more readable, than any of the alternatives, whilst being much much shorter.
Youtube-dl and awk to grep out of a YouTube channel.
If I were doing it again I would use youtube-dl -o to just print the base64, instead of "manually" renaming it to that with ls>awk:mv>sh.