CDC is great, but in Postgres at least, you can build a very general trigger based audit log by serializing the row in its entirety. Running Kafka, even if it’s managed plus Debezium is hugely more complicated then adding a test that enforces any migration that adds a table also sets up an audit log insert trigger.

I’m currently in the process of standing up some Debezium based infra so I’m acutely aware of how annoying and involved it is. There’s also inherent limitations in Debezuium/kafka like maximum message sizes that may not support row shapes that Postgres handles just fine.