It is not only about whether people can figure it out awk. It is also about how supportable the solution is. SQL provides many features specifically to support complex querying and is much more accessible to most people - you can't reasonably expect your business analysts to do complex analysis using awk.

Not only that, it provides a useful separation from the storage format so you can use it to query a flat file exposed as table using Apache Drill or a file on s3 exposed by Athena or data in an actual table stored in a database and so on. The flexibility is terrific.

I have been using sql for decades and I am not comfortable with awk or intend to become so. There are better tools.