Worse in some ways, better in others. DuckDB is often an excellent tool for this kind of task. Since it can run parallelized reads I imagine it's often faster than command line tool, and with easier to understand syntax
I've been using this pattern (scripts or code that execute commands against DuckDB) to process data more recently, and the ability to do deep investigations on the data as you're designing the pipeline (or when things go wrong) is very useful. Doing it with a code-based solution (read data into objects in memory) is much more challenging to view the data. Debugging tools to inspect the objects on the heap is painful compared to being able to JOIN/WHERE/GROUP BY your data.
The bottleneck in the example was maxing out disk IO, which I don't think duckdb can help with.
On the other hand, unix sockets combined with socat can perform some real wizardry, but I never quite got the hang of that style.
If the tool of interest works with files (like the UNIX tools do) it fits very well.
If the tool doesn't work with single files I have had some success in using Makefiles for generic processing tasks by creating a marker file that a given task was complete as part of the target.