agree with one and two and younger me would have agreed with your third point but I think I don’t anymore.
yes cut is the simpler and mostly functional tool you need for those tasks.
but it is just so common to need a slight tweak or to want to substitute something or to want to do a specific regex match or weird multi character delimiter or something and you can do it all easily in awk instead of having to pipe three extra times to do everything with the simplest tool.
agree with one and two and younger me would have agreed with your third point but I think I don’t anymore.
yes cut is the simpler and mostly functional tool you need for those tasks.
but it is just so common to need a slight tweak or to want to substitute something or to want to do a specific regex match or weird multi character delimiter or something and you can do it all easily in awk instead of having to pipe three extra times to do everything with the simplest tool.