Does cut work with quoted fields correctly? My understanding was that it was just a dumb line tokenizer and CSV is a little more complex than that, e.g., CSV rows can span more than one line when fields contain line breaks.
No, it doesn't and therefore is no viable option for many real-world datasets.
Which means an effective thing to do when you control the data pipeline is to ban tabs and line-breaks from your values, and then use `cut` on tab-separated files.
Or just not use CSV as a data transfer format :D
I think you're missing the point. Unix tools like `cut` are really effective ways to deal with plain text data, who cares if it's CSV.
Sure, if you can redefine your data format, you can take shortcuts. But otherwise comparing cut to a CSV parser is just a different way of saying »if it doesn't have to be correct, I can make it as fast as I want«.