Totally agree with this. "Kafka is terrible if you use it with poor practices" should be the title of this. It's totally clickbait targeting the "Database Inside Out" articles / concept, which if you read the most common 3-page high level it explicitly states you should be materializing up into other data sources / structures / systems / etc

To date, I've never written code that reads from a Kafka topic that wasn't taking data and transforming + materializing it into domain intelligence