awk is practically made for record processing, within the shell you can set $IFS. The reason so many ancient UNIX file formats use : as separator is because that's the default setting of $IFS.

It's all a huge PITA, though. I mean there's a reason why people started using perl instead. Nushell is great for that kind of stuff, even more so if you have random json or such lying around it loads just as easily. "Everything is a string" was a mistake.