I actually find awk very readable. It's a far simpler language than Python really.
The exception is perhaps if you need to do something complex, like parse a csv.
This is true, but if you already know Python, then "awk + Python" has greater total complexity than "just Python". So the question is does awk add enough value to be worth the incremental cost of learning it in addition to Python? I think for many, the answer is "no".
It's like all of the bash scripts that we see that don't handle failures and traps or print a usage block.
awk -F : '/\/home/ { print $1":"$3":"$4":"$6 } '