> awk wasn't very portable because you still had the awk,nawk,gawk flavors
Debian and Ubuntu both ship with mawk and Alpine has the busybox flavor of awk (nawk like). MacOS still ships with a default nawk. I don't know the scene has changed much, still many flavors out there.
The issues from the 80s/90s were mostly fixed by POSIX in the 2000's. IIRC all major Unix-like systems ship with awk implementations that are POSIX-compliant by default today.
With a few warts of course, but not like back then.