I'm often in the same position, for me it's often quicker to hack something together with what I know than using a new technology.

It's just a matter of experience with the toolchain.

You only have to be cautious when your input is mangled in some way (with escape characters etc) and your toolchain cannot cope with such things.

There are many different versions of cut, awk, sed and even jq. I don't consider this very portable.