I have written scripts in awk (what seems a lifetime ago!), bash, then perl, ruby and python - in that chronological order. I think awk scripting didn't take off for the masses because while it was good for its goal, (1) it was a bit niche; the common knowledge people came in to work on unix systems was bash and awk/grep/sed one-liners - learning awk would have been work that was seen to have specialized gains, (2) yes, Perl sort of provided a sane alternative to the mix of shell scripts, magic one-liners and awk scripts. Of course, later it was supplanted by Python (transitioning through a brief period of Ruby).

Reading legacy scripts was wild back then - you had to be somewhat good at bash, unix tools like awk, C, make, Perl:-)