At our company we use a ton of services that operate essentially as as functions on a Kafka stream (well, they tend to read/write in batches for efficiency) but

At our company we use a ton of services that operate essentially as as functions on a Kafka stream (well, they tend to read/write in batches for efficiency) but we write event streams we want to query later into a regular database for later query. It works out very well. The idea of our poor Kafka cluster having to field queries in addition to the load of acting as a transport layer is frightening. The 'superpower' Kafka gives you is the ability to turn back time if something goes wrong and the ability to orchestrate really big pipeline. You have to build or buy a fair bit of tooling to make it work though.