Just because a tool is powerful doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. There’s a reason most people should just use a DB and not a raw event log. The issue I have with ES proponents is they seem to all pretend there is no additional complexity that comes with it. I think ES is useful but not always and requires weighing the costs and benefits, and we need to be honest about it.
Even the data stream of a TCP connection is a projection of events, which is why (and how) we can reconstruct them by replaying captured segments.
So just because there are some lousy executions of a general architecture, doesn’t mean we should recoil from the basic idea.
My takeaway is that successful event-sourced structures are crafted for the domain they represent. I’ve developed a couple for my own work, for very specific aspects of an application, and they work well in context.
If your experience has been that a general-purpose ES framework leads to shitty, hard-to-maintain apps, I’d say that’s evidence for the corollary.