Things like Maxwell[0] help a lot with the getting stuff into Kafka from the DB, but I agree with your point entirely. Kafka is not something I’d recommend unless you’ve got a team dedicated to maintaining it. Thankfully Confluent is rising up to fill that need and reasonably priced. Confluent also has an offering for streaming binlogs into Kafka too.
Right, that's the data warehouse method that I described. "Put them into their system" is a lot harder work than just typing in "put Kafka on top of your database."