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I don't tend to use awk in scripts as I do tend to do them in Python, but I do use awk on almost daily basis in one-liners.
Probably the most common thing for me is so I can read a config file without annoying comments and big line spaces.
grep -v "^#" krb5.conf | awk NF
awk is awesome! I love it, and I do not regret learning how to use it.
That said, my workflow invariably always shifts from starting with awk to do something simply with a tiny one-liner, to then doing that with perl or python, and sometimes even creating a file to make the by-now multi-line scripts more easily readable.
I do not recommend starting with awk, if you do not know other languages already such as Python.
In short, let your intuition guide you.
cut is actually next to useless, because it cannot understand that multiple spaces can still be a single separator in most text files in /etc. You have to use AWK.
Just use awk and when needed ask ChatGPT for the syntax of the command