The reason is (yes I will be so bold as to speak for all on this one) both using ai to do your thinking for you, and essentially advocating to any readers to do the same simply by writing how well it works for you. Some people find this actively bad, of negative value, and some find it merely utterly uninteresting, of no value, and both responses produce downvotes.

But it's automatic that you can not see this. If you recognized any problem, you would not be doing it, or at the very least would not describe it as anything but an embarrasing admission, like talking about a guilty pleasure vs a wholesome good thing.

So don't bother asking "What's wrong with using this tool that works vs any other tool that works?" If you have to ask... There are several things wrong, not just one.

Or for some it could just be that "I used to use awk but now I just use ___" just doesn't add anything to a discussion about awk. "I used to use awk a lot but now I just use ruby". Ok? So what? Some people go as far as to downvote for that.

Also now that you whined about downvotes, I wouldn't be surprised if that isn't the cause of some itslef, because it absolutely does deserve it.

There might possibly also be at least some just from "I'm not a programmer but here's my thoughts on this programming topic" though that isn't very wrong in my own opinion. You even say you've actually used awk a lot so as far as I'm concerned you can absolutely talk about awk and probably don't need to be so humble as to deny yourself as a pragrammer. It's admirable to avoid making claims about yourself, but I bet a bystander would call you at least a programmer, even if we'll leave the actual level of sophistication unspecified.

Since I wrote this comment, I did not up or downvote myself. But for the record, I would have downvoted for the ai.

Making a buck off the disinterested is ok, being disinterested yourself isn't.