The gnu tools are super fast and do the job. Ive seen people spinning their own solutions which end up being super slow and arguable take more time to develop.

With any gnu tools it is great that they will stay there for your life and are usually by default installed on every system

Yeah, except anything that is not trivial ends up being write-only

Modern programming language features are overrated. I prefer to choose the tools that are the most portable and involve the least social friction (i.e. something that is widely understood by people I work with).

For "fun" projects (stuff I'm not paid for) and workflow optimization, I just care about portability, which means C (with heavy use of the C stream library, a simple collections library of about 200 LOC, and occasionally POSIX syscalls) and shell scripting. After spending a lot of time learning languages as a hobby, I just don't believe the dark corners and warts of C and shell scripting are any worse than other languages.