I feel the same about using Awk, it is just fun to use. I like that variables have defined initial values so they don't need to be declared. And the most common bits of control flow needed to process an input file are implicit. Some fun things I've written with awk

Plain text accounting program in awk https://github.com/benjaminogles/ledger.bash

Literate programming/static site generator in awk https://github.com/benjaminogles/lit

Although the latter just uses awk as a weird shell and maintains a couple child processes for converting md to html and executing code blocks with output piped into the document