Which is a shame, because I doubt I'll be loading modules from CPAN for awk any time soon, and I routinely use modules from CPAN or that I myself have written in my perl one liners. In fact, I have a specialized project-perl.sh in my project's PATH that loads a few modules (Try::Tiny, Path::Tiny, Data::Dumper, etc), sets a local::lib, and loads the main project module, allowing access to most the functions I've written for the current project, and passes all the extra params through to the underlying perl command.

If my codebase wasn't already in perl I wouldn't necessarily be able to benefit from a large library of my own functions relevant to the problem, but at least I would still have CPAN to fall back on. I'm not sure awk will ever be able to compete with that.