I have used awk a lot on csv files. I basically agree with your comments, for me the use case is preliminary exploration, not really much more. There is also the issue of one liners not really ending themselves to good coding practice generally, but it sure is great to dive into a file quickly.

What I came here to say is that when I have a csv file I'm looking at with awk, thos first thing I do is a `wc -l`, then get NF (number of fields) for the first row of the csv (here e.g. 80), followed by `awk -F, 'NF==80'` | wc -l`. If the numbers don't match, then I know it's not parsing properly.

The most common issue of course is commas in quotes strings. I have a small script that removes these, so I can still use awk easily. Anything more complex like newlines in quotes strings and maybe it's time to question if awk is still worth it.