I generally find Avro to be a better replacement for CSV than Parquet. It’s a better drop in for the typical CSV use case of “process this file row by row”.
Avro is a row-based format that supports schema evolution, but unfortunately it is not a very popular format in general and there's much less support for it than Parquet. My team evaluated several formats (ORC, Parquet, Avro) but landed on Parquet due to columnar performance and wider support, though you're right, it's less performant for row-wise operations (but not by that much). If you really want row-wise performance, better to go with sqlite than Avro.
