> Is there something about load balancing REST requests to different DB nodes that is less complicated than Kafka?

To be clear I wasn't talking about DB nodes, I was talking about skipping an explicit queue altogether.

But let's say you were asking about load balancing REST requests to different backend servers:

Yes, in the sense that "load balanced REST microservice with retry logic" is such a common pattern that is better understood by SWE's and SRE's everywhere.

No, in the sense that if you really did just need a distributed queue then your life would be simpler reusing a battle-tested implementation instead of reinventing that wheel.