That is the real truth people are voicing when they say Temporal is heavy. They are really saying: Durable, reliable, distributed workloads are hard and it takes effort to manage! And that is true. I know of no systems that make that genuinely easy. It is a hard discipline. Maybe Temporal makes that harder than it should be, but I have no experience there.

There are no free lunches in this space. I have no idea how good or bad Temporal is since my usage is pretty small and isolated, but software rarely just works and impresses me and Temporal for my local machine orchestrating genuinely did. I think Netflix's conductor is another cool option, but I ended up with Temporal due to license.