I think there would be, but I can only raise my own hand :-)

A tool called sd exists that's close enough for sed, but I haven't seen anything similar for awk.

I took a minute to think about it. It would be much more work to add it to awk. :( And replacing every regex evaluation could slow scripts significantly, although this could be a good challenge! :D

Are you using "sd" or is there anything wrong with it as a replacement of sed?