I had a similar very tiny-scale problem that was solved much quicker by awk+perl. I had a relatively large dataset across many YAML files that I needed to compute a result. Turns out that using yq / jq to performn a query was much (order of magnitudes) slower (>10m) to compute any kind of result. Outputting the data into CSV, then iterating over that was much, much faster (seconds). Of course, dumping it into SQlite and querying that was nearly instantaneous.

I know it’s not a direct 1:1 comparison, but it brings to mind that solutions that were made common decades ago are still relevant today.