I only recently learned Awk enough to be useful. But I still don't reach for it when I probably should.

What are the most common cases where you reach for Awk instead of some other tools?

I recently used it to parse and recombine data from the OpenVPN status file. That file has a few differently formatted tables in the same file. Using Awk, I was able to change a variable as each table was encountered, this I could change the Awk program behavior by which table it was operating on.

I had to take large CSV files like {question, right_ans, wrong_ans1, wrong_ans2, wrong_ans3} and covert them into SQL insert files. Few caveats - some could be duplicates, some characters were not allowed, and some had formatting issues. The first issue was avoided by upserting, but the other two I used Awk and Sed for and put together a fairly robust script far quicker than if I reached for Python. I probably would have reached for Python if I realised how many edge cases there were but I didn't know that at the start so the script just sort of grew as I went along, but now they're my go-to tools for similar tasks.

Awk is not really very good at reading complex CSVs (as defined in RFC-4180), where newlines (record separators) can appear within quoted strings. It can be done, but sometimes it's tricky.

The PHP fgetcsv function has been more convenient when I have had more exotic examples.

If the CSV is simple, awk remains a very good tool.

http://lorance.freeshell.org/csv/

There's also https://github.com/dbro/csvquote which is more unix-like in philosophy: it sits in a pipeline, and only handles transforming the CVS data into something that awk (or other utilities) can more easily deal with. I haven't used it but will probably try it next time I need something like that.