I've done this for single-use pipelines when built up because the nature of the data is unfamiliar. It usually starts with

   cat file | less

and then

   cat file | grep bar | less

and then

   cat file | grep bar | awk '{ print $1 }' | less

and so on.

But if it's going to be used more than once then it does seem odd to have the unnecessary commands. Maybe "advanced" awk (beyond print $1) is unknown to people?

if you are only doing 'print $1' you should be using cut. but whatever.

Its a balance of clarity, vs efficiency. Also, I chose uniq over sort -u, for the -c option.

That being said, point well made.

Well, I often do:

    cat some.log | awk '/regexp/ { print $2}' | sort| uniq

Then tweak that line to get what I want, then change it to:

    zcat some.log*| ...