[Chris2048]

The first and last items in your list provide no reason why they are relevant, there is no "tone", nor "advocacy" - it's not "odd" to ask for that context, as given here.

[kazinator]

Awk is found in small-ish embedded systems that don't have no reason to waste space on Perl or anything like it.

One reason for this is that the popular BusyBox project includes an Awk implementation: BusyBox Awk.

Pretty much everywhere there is BusyBox, there is an Awk, unless someone went out of their way to compile it out of the BuxyBox binary.