While serving time in HPC I saw a set of ETL jobs that were written using awk and xargs that beat the pants off a lot of in house code on both a performance and a simplicity standpoint. You lose a bit of "safety" when you take that approach (yes, I know you can do it in awk), but if you tightly control the inputs you don't need as many guard rails.
It's both unsurprising and amazing to me that a well crafted shell script can be highly performant.
Totally get your point about being able to go faster with tight specification of the expected inputs!
And yeah awk is renowned for being able to crunch through things (especially huge volumes of text) at quite an astounding rate for a scripting language!
It's both unsurprising and amazing to me that a well crafted shell script can be highly performant.