I feel like I might hold the record for the most absurd AWK success story, which I hope to write up some day.

I wrote the front-end for what became my highest-traffic website (RhymeZone.com) in AWK back in 1996, and it ran for 27 years with just occasional feature additions every few years, serving up to 2 million pages a day from a single medium-size EC2 instance at its peak. Even in 1996 it seemed like a bad idea to make a website in pure awk, but looking back I'm glad I did.