Piping into AWK feels like a misuse of the tool in all but the simplest of cases. Don't forget that you can write complete AWK scripts and invoke them from a file!

I use ack for this purpose, because the color filtering options are so good.

https://beyondgrep.com/

Every time I've done research (twice) ripgrep comes out on top.

Usually it's something like rg > ag > ack > grep and that's overall testimonial, not just speed.

What am I missing?

I started using ack about 14 years ago, so theres a lot of inertia there. It is slower than the others, but it was so much faster at the time for searching through source trees than grep.

For log colorizing, I make use of the --color-match and --passthru arguments, like https://powdahound.com/2009/10/colorize-log-output-with-ack/

For log colorizing, here's the approximate equivalent of that blog post for ripgrep:

    cat UNLICENSE 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:red' public 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:green' heirs 
      | rg --passthru --color always --colors 'match:fg:cyan' benefit