Not at all - grep piped to jq works like a charm - I have made reports using that in the CLI wrapped in a Makefile that were exec friendly. And there are other tools like gron for example.
And if you are building something serious and with some sort of scale then you will need to have something like ELK stack anyway to aggregate and display data - there is no getting away from that.
Working with unstructured logs however is a mess. Perl / Awk helps of course but it is a lot of extra effort. And in the end, at scale you will just be writing those scripts to turn that mess into structured data to feed into that same ELK stack anyway.
And if you are building something serious and with some sort of scale then you will need to have something like ELK stack anyway to aggregate and display data - there is no getting away from that.
Working with unstructured logs however is a mess. Perl / Awk helps of course but it is a lot of extra effort. And in the end, at scale you will just be writing those scripts to turn that mess into structured data to feed into that same ELK stack anyway.