I have found a handful of unconventional applications for awk -- I once needed a tiny pcm pulsewave generator, and awk was surprisingly decent for the job [1].

Aside from that I've mostly been using it for quick statistics [2], but it quickly moves into perl territory...

1: https://github.com/9001/asm/blob/hovudstraum/etc/bin/beeps#L...

2: https://ocv.me/doc/unix/oneliners/#965bfcb8