It does work for a certain volume of data. You can index fields you're interested in, even do so after the fact, and it's like any other database in that case. And sometimes you have small apps that do need complete historical log data, so Kafka et al just introduce unnecessary complexity since you'd need to aggregate into a key value store anyways.

But if you do this, god forbid you go beyond where indices can fit in RAM of a single machine. And you will do so, with probability one given your product doesn't shut down. So you're running a gauntlet against a redesign.

Try some Lucene based software and tell me how it goes.