I think the parent was referring to using awk/sed to do the equivalent of:

    find ... | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 ...

That still requires your xargs to have -0 support, though, and I'd be surprised to have that without the corresponding option on find. But I've done this before when feeding xargs from something other than find.

It is also built on the assumption that filenames never contain newlines, which is wrong in general.

It's baffling to me that POSIX allows non-printable characters in file names, but here we are. Surely they had a reason for this decision.