I learned Awk in 1988 before Perl was around (on our systems, anyway). It was super useful at the time. But if you know Perl and Perl is available on your system, there's certainly not a compelling need for writing standalone, multi-line Awk programs. But Awk is really, really useful for one-liners. As Larry Wall has said: "I still say awk '{print $1}' a lot."
Brian Kernighan himself, in this 2015 talk [1] on language design, states that Awk was primarily intended for one-liner usage (he mentions this at 20:43).
Brian Kernighan himself, in this 2015 talk [1] on language design, states that Awk was primarily intended for one-liner usage (he mentions this at 20:43).
[1] https://youtu.be/Sg4U4r_AgJU?t=19m45s