Yes, but for a very specific case. I used to write highly portable scripts that could be executed in different environments (various linux distros, including minimal containers, freebsd and even solaris 10). I couldn’t use bash, perl, python and even gawk. Only POSIX shell (I always tested my scripts with dash and ksh93, for solaris 10 compatibility - with its jsh), portable awk (tested with original-awk, gawk and mawk) and portable sed (better forget it if you need to support solaris).
Before that I didn’t understand why should I need awk if I know perl. And awk really sucks. Once I had to replace a perl one-liner with an awk script of ~30 lines for portability.
P.S. I never use awk just for print $1 as many do. It’s an overkill.