True, it’s actually a lot simpler than RabbitMQ. People seem to assume “giant ball of enterprisey Java means” that the experience using it will be complicated. Kafka is extremely reliable, simple to cluster, battle tested (I haven’t hit an actual bug in Kafka in ages), the self-healing is turnkey, and has way stronger guarantees for clients.

Where it bites people is that it’s not a queue and scaling is harder than just add more consumers.