However, Eggexes are a thin, mostly-syntactic layer over regexes. You still have to understand the regex engine to use them. If this sounds useless to you because you don’t currently understand any flavor of regex or parsing, I encourage you not to give up on learning regexes. (https://www.regular-expressions.info/ was how I learned; it’s a great tutorial.) Text-parsing engines, including regex engines, are a powerful concept that can be used in many situations, and I think it’s worth spending the effort learning them until, to paraphrase another commenter, regexes become the human-readable language you were searching for. Or Eggexes, at least.
Yeah, regex can be a bit clunky at times and has a steeper learning curve, but they're pretty industry standard at this point, and portable across languages with a few caveats.
Is there an alternative that is clearly superior?
It uses operator overloading to build patterns from component parts. I don't think anything can replace the terseness of regex for command line use, or vim searching, cases like that.
But for a program, give me lpeg every time.
I can understand that a complex pattern might look scary if you're unfamiliar, but if you work with it long enough, you can put patterns together with relative ease.