And this is where Perl 5 says hi. It's also widespread and easily available, can do anything awk can, and isn't similarly fractured (Raku now being its own spinoff world). The article's complaints about its syntax are a matter of taste, of course.
Also being able to use https://p3rl.org/App::FatPack to bundle (pure perl) dependencies along with your code into a single script file to ship around makes life significantly easier deployment-wise (and https://p3rl.org/Object::Remote allows for 'no deployment at all', it runs 'ssh <target> perl -' and ships the code it needs across the wire on connect).