Then the author should have gone on to discuss not just the implementation they now have to maintain, but also all the client implementations they'll have to keep re-creating for their custom solution. Or they could talk about all the industry standard tools that work with kafka and not their custom implementation.

Or they could have not mentioned kafka at all and just demonstrated their pub/sub implementation with PG. They could have not tried to make it about the buzzword resume driven engineering people vs. common sense folks such as himself.