You're going to have to be a tiny bit more specific here. NYT is THE factory of wrongness for sure. In every dimension. Are we talking "yellow cake" wrong, or somewhere else on the severity of f'up scale...
^ this.
All they needed was a database, or possibly a DB that supports row signing. I mean actually they could have done it with git. They don't publish that many stories an hour.
Everything about this setup is just plain wrong, and to then boast about it, absolute madness.
Currently I'm using DDS, specifically from eprosma. I would avoid that implementation unless you're using java.
I really like NATS. However I would probably use what every is bundled with the cloud system I'm using, unless its super critical.
MQTT is quite nice for things, as is rabbit.
yeahnah, that leads to people treating queues like databases (I'm looking at you new york times, you know what you did wrong)
its either a queue, or a pubsub, either way its ephemeral. Once its gone, it should stay gone. thats what database, object stores or filesystems are for.
Kafka is a beast, has lots of bells and whistles and grinds to a halt when you look at it funny. Yes, it can scale, but also it can just sulk.
rabbit has it's own set of problems, and frankly it's probably not choose either anymore.