I don't think that Kafka is bad per se, it's just that it's often used as a message queue which it doesn't seem optimised for. Half of the stuff you need for a

I don't think that Kafka is bad per se, it's just that it's often used as a message queue which it doesn't seem optimised for. Half of the stuff you need for a proper MQ (e.g. DLT handling) isn't provided by Kafka proper (although interestingly it is provided by spring-kafka - but that locks you into that tech and just means another abstraction which makes things harder to understand). Also, Kafka doesn't really deal well with long-running consumers, something that might be quite necessary for many async systems.