To be specific, the picture I am thinking about in particular is described in a slide titled "Local consistency points in the absence of Global Consistency" (from this talk: https://youtu.be/VYOMmwkdSig?t=1817), where it shows how each local consistency point is ideally implemented using ES/CQRS. I also agree that the tools Confluent are currently providing us with today do not make this trivial.

Edit: the other big picture Confluent quote I like is "You are not building microservices, you are building an inside-out database" (Tim Berglund, Confluent, 2018) which is a perfect answer to this other quote: "The hardest part of microservices is your data" (Christian Posta, Red Hat, 2017)