But column-oriented output is still structured and tools like AWK are meant to be a "programmable filter" on it. Reading or outputting deeply nested structures like JSON or S-exps would make it less practical to pipe programs together and instead have big "monolithic filters" with lots of options.
Parsing columns of text with awk or any other text tools is vexingly problematic. How do you even define "column"? What if columns contain whitespace? How do you differentiate that from the whitespace between columns?
