I'm probably biased, but in the number of cases where I had to work with Kafka, I'd really prefer to simply have an SQL database. In all of those cases I struggled to understand why developers wanted Kafka, what problem was it solving better than the database they already had, and for the life of me, there just wasn't one.
I'm not saying that configuring and deploying databases is easy, but it's probably going to happen anyway. Deploying and configuring Kafka is a huge headache: bad documentation, no testing tools, no way to really understand performance in the light of durability guarantees (which are also obscured by the poor quality documentation). It's just an honestly bad product (from the infra perspective): poor UX, poor design... and worst of all, it's kind of useless from the developer standpoint. Not 100% useless, but whatever it offers can be replaced by other existing tools with a tiny bit of work.
I'm not saying that configuring and deploying databases is easy, but it's probably going to happen anyway. Deploying and configuring Kafka is a huge headache: bad documentation, no testing tools, no way to really understand performance in the light of durability guarantees (which are also obscured by the poor quality documentation). It's just an honestly bad product (from the infra perspective): poor UX, poor design... and worst of all, it's kind of useless from the developer standpoint. Not 100% useless, but whatever it offers can be replaced by other existing tools with a tiny bit of work.