Queues are a tool in your distributed system toolbox. When it's suitable it works wonderfully (typical caveats apply). If your perception is indeed correct it'

Queues are a tool in your distributed system toolbox. When it's suitable it works wonderfully (typical caveats apply). If your perception is indeed correct it'd attribute it to your 3rd point. People usually write blogposts about new shiny stuff. I personally use queues in my design all the time, particularly to transfer data between different systems with higher decoupling. The only pain I have ever experienced was when an upstream system backfilled 7 days of data, which clogged our queues with old requests. Running normally it would have taken over 100 hours to process all the data, while massively increasing the latency of fresh data. The solution was to manually purge the queue, and manually backfill the most recent missing data. Even if you need to be careful around unbound queue sizes I still believe they are a great tool.