At the same time unicode support was added super late (like 2 years ago ?), like any other shell tools passing content to awk by piping has edge cases (anything ressembling a CTRL+D sequence will cut the feed, and there must be dozens of other edge cases I have no idea about that will only bite me at the worst time.

Awk is an impressive tool, but putting it on a pedastal blinds people from the weak spots and why they should probably move serious tasks to more specialized, but modern and adapted tools.