I tried awk before (the default implementation on most distros) to do a simple task of making a template engine, I learnt a bit about awk and sed (basic stuff) but I couldn't manage to do what I wanted that I could do in python with a few lines and one minute.
The man pages are nice but I didn't have the patience to start reading every thing to just do simple stuff like replace regex pattern with a content of a file located at the path generated from a capture group of that regex and some other stuff.
Not quite sure what you mean but it does sound like awk was the wrong tool for the job there. For the sort of templating I'm thinking of shell scripts or m4 would have been a better tool. Taking some structured data and piping it to one of those is where awk shines (that and pattern matching).
It was for making a static site generator. Templating engine was a part of it where I wanted to add functionality for components, generating event handling, adding SEO (meta tags), gluing shell code etc similiar to jsx/vue.
The man pages are nice but I didn't have the patience to start reading every thing to just do simple stuff like replace regex pattern with a content of a file located at the path generated from a capture group of that regex and some other stuff.