> this means that if you write non-trivial Awk code, nobody on your team will be able to read it.
Sort of! A lot of AWK is easy to read even if you don't remember how to write it. There are a few quirks like how gsub modifies its target in-place (and how its default target is $0), and of course understanding the overall pattern-action layout. But I think most reasonable (not too clever, not too complicated) AWK scripts would also be readable to a typical programmer even if they don't know AWK specifically.
I wrote a BASIC renumberer and compactor in bash, using every bashism I could so that it called no externals and didn't even use backticks to call child bashes, just pure bash itself (but late version and use every available feature for convenience and compactness).
I then re-wrote it in awk out of curiosity and it looked almost the same.
Crazy bash expansion syntax and commandline parser abuse was replaced by actual proper functions, but the whole thing when done was almost a line by line in-place replacement, so almost the same loc and structure.
Both versions share most of the same advantages over something like python. Both single binary interpreters always already installed. Both versions will run on basically any system any platform any version (going forward at least) without needing to install anything let alone anything as gobsmacking ridiculous as pip or venv.(1)
But the awk version is actually readable.
And unlike bash, awk already pretty much stopped changing very much decades ago, so not only is it forward compatible, it's pretty backwards compatible too.
Not that that is generally a thing you have to worry about. We don't make new machines that are older than some code we wrote 5 years ago. Old bash or awk code always works on the next new machine, and that's all you ever need(2).
There is gnu vs bsd vs posix vs mawk/nawk but that's not much of a problem and it's not a constantly breaking new-version problem but the same gnu vs posix differences for the last 30 years. You have to knowingly go out of your way to use mawk etc.
(1) bash you still have for example how everything is on bash 5 or at worst 4, except a brand new Mac today still ships with bash3, and so you can actually run into backwards compatibility in bash.
(2) and bash does actually have plugins & extensions and they do vary from system to system so you do have things you either need to avoid using or run into exactly the same breakage as python or ruby or whatever.
For writing a program vs gluing other programs together, really awk should be the goat.
Sort of! A lot of AWK is easy to read even if you don't remember how to write it. There are a few quirks like how gsub modifies its target in-place (and how its default target is $0), and of course understanding the overall pattern-action layout. But I think most reasonable (not too clever, not too complicated) AWK scripts would also be readable to a typical programmer even if they don't know AWK specifically.