>Apple being actively hostile with the default coreutils requiring you to layer multiple third party tools just to get a modern version of awk and grep

This is a pretty trivial complaint. It's three lines pasted into the shell available on like a hundred blogs on the internet to update your coreutils. If you are at the point where you need a modern awk or grep and you absolutely cannot do with what is installed already, I would be shocked if you didn't already know about brew and have them installed.