> it was generally more brittle and harder to maintain
It depends on the system in question, sometimes it's really worth it. Such setups are brittle by design, otherwise you get teams that ship fast but produce bugs that surface randomly in the runtime.
Absolutely, it can work well when there is a team devoted to the schema registry and helping with adoption. But it needs to be worth it to be able to amortize the resources, so probably best for bigger organizations.