Agree with this sentiment - it’s easy to be judgmental about these things, but project-level issues and decisions can be very complicated and engineers often have little to no visibility into them. We’re using Kafka for a gigantic pipeline where IMO any reasonably modern database would suffice (and may even be superior), but our performance requirements are unclear. At some point in the distant future, we may have a significant surge in data quantity and speed, requiring greater throughput and (de)serialization speed, but I am not convinced that Kafka ultimately helps us there. I imagine this is a case where the program leadership was sold a solution which we are now obligated to use. This happens a LOT, and I have seen unnecessary and unused products cost companies millions over the years. For example, my team was doing analysis on replacing our existing Atlassian Data Center with other solutions, and in doing so, we discovered several underused/unused Atlassian plugins for which we are paying very high license fees. At some point, users over the years had requested some functionality for a specific workflow and the plugins were purchased. The people and projects went away or otherwise processes became OBE, but the plugins happily hummed along while the bills were paid.