This has been my experience, too. I worked at just one place that had a really good handle on high-volume, high-velocity streaming data, and they didn't use Flink or Storm or Kafka or anything like that. They mostly just used the KISS principle and a protobuf-style wire format.[1]

There is definitely a point where these sorts of scale-out-centric solutions are unavoidable. Short of that point, though, they're probably best avoided.

[1]: (It's truly amazing how many CPU cycles you can reclaim just by removing branch instructions from your message deserialization code.)