If you find yourself in that situation, migrating to a more performant queuing solution is not that much of a leap. You already have an overall system architecture that scales well (async processing with a queue).

_Ideally_ the queuing technology is abstracted from the job-submitters/job-runners anyway. It's a bit more work if multiple services are just writing to the queue table directly.

I agree that the _moment_ the system comes to a screeching halt is definitely not fun.