Dismissing a mature and widely-used tool by saying "it sucks" doesn't inspire me to read more, but I did. Personally I think it's easier to learn, read and maintain /\$[0-9]+\.[0-9][0-9]/ rather than a bunch of new Dart/Javascript/Python/Java methods. It's certainly more efficient. But I've been using regexes since before any of those languages were invented.

You're going to encounter regexes in other contexts -- text editors, Unix/Linux utilities, databases, code you didn't write -- and if you can only use them with training wheels you're stuck.