This. It's often a good enough tool for solving problems that technically require a specialized tool. Except learning the specialized tool takes an order of magnitude more time than iterating on awk to get a good-enough solution.
I'm not proud to admit it, but I've used awk in a couple places where I should have properly used `expect' instead. Except, I don't know expect well and haven't gotten to the point where it was worth the investment in learning it.
I've also used awk to get button presses from an input stream on a MIDI controller. For me, I found that the up front cost of learning a few awk commands quickly made it's return on investment.