Sample of one. I came of age on Linux in the late 90s/early 00s. Through other nerds on IRC channels I became familiar with Perl and didn't like it. I also picked up basic awk in the context of one-liners for shell pipelines and it was pretty nice for that. Easier to remember than the flags for cut and friends.

Learning awk a bit more deeply in recent years has been good too. I can write one liners that do more. I shipped a full awk script once, for something unimportant, but I would never do that again. For serious text munging these days I'd rather write a Rust program.