I would argue it's not just about familiarity. I had the same reaction to that quote and feel the same as you do, and yet I have been using jq before I first learned and started using awk.
For a long time I had been familiar with jq, but every time I had to use it for any non-trivial task after not touching it for a while I had to go to the docs and really scratch my head. Meanwhile, I had no idea about awk, and for ages I would just see those awk one-liners on Stack Overflow as weird arcane alternatives to "simply" piping sed, grep and tr over bash.
However, one day I finally had the time and the reason to have a look at AWK Programming for a specific use that I needed, and it immediately clicked. Awk makes sense and now I can easily fall back to it every time, even if I haven't used it for ages. At most, all I need to look up is the order of parameters in the gawk regex functions.
And yet, time and time again I am baffled by jq, however much I have used it in the past. Whenever I need to parse a JSON I'm happy enough if I can use jq to get it to a good enough halfway point so that I can pipe it to awk to do the actual work.
For a long time I had been familiar with jq, but every time I had to use it for any non-trivial task after not touching it for a while I had to go to the docs and really scratch my head. Meanwhile, I had no idea about awk, and for ages I would just see those awk one-liners on Stack Overflow as weird arcane alternatives to "simply" piping sed, grep and tr over bash.
However, one day I finally had the time and the reason to have a look at AWK Programming for a specific use that I needed, and it immediately clicked. Awk makes sense and now I can easily fall back to it every time, even if I haven't used it for ages. At most, all I need to look up is the order of parameters in the gawk regex functions.
And yet, time and time again I am baffled by jq, however much I have used it in the past. Whenever I need to parse a JSON I'm happy enough if I can use jq to get it to a good enough halfway point so that I can pipe it to awk to do the actual work.