Someone used the wrong tool for the job. If an awk script gets more than a few dozen lines, it’s time to use another language/tool to process that data.
I’ve been hearing this debate for nearly 32 years. It’s a useless argument.
The correct name for the # symbol is “octothorpe,” but how many people do you know who call it that? You’ll either hear it called the Pound sign (by us older folk) or the more modern Hash mark.