Why is that cringe? They genuinely probably came across awk before perl (I know I did, I read "The AWK Programming Language" and then went on to "The C Programming Language").
Having that said, awk is great and it's been the same for decades and available on every system (the same can't really be said about perl).
In practice, on actual systems, you're likely to encounter nawk (the One True Awk), gawk (GNU Awk), mawk ("Mike's AWK", a fast awk), and Busybox's AWK.
There are other variants, yes, but in virtually every case these are fully POSIX compliant and/or have a POSIX mode.
(And in truth, gawk is the only non-fully-POSIX awk I've encountered --- it extends standard AWK with asort and the "'" formatting modifier (which prints localised htousands separators in numeric data).
Programmes written for any one awk, if using POSIX features only, will run on any awk.
Many small / embedded systems (think routers, stock Android, or any POSIX-only Unix variant) must have awk, but often don't include Perl.
You'll also find variants of Perl, though the relative stasis of that language make this less an issue now than in the '90s and aughts.
