And our log messages are ridiculously big at times (15k to as big as 50k).
Our pipe never has problems. What fails for us is Elastic Search. In fact at one point in the past we did 100k messages/s when embarrassingly had debug turned on in production and RabbitMQ did not fail but Elastic Search and sadly Flume did as well (I tried to get rid of flume with a custom Rust AMQP to Elastic Search client but at the time had some bugs with the libraries.. Maybe I will recheck out Mozilla Heka someday).
There is this sort of beating of the developer chest with a lot of tech companies.. that hey listen we are ultra important and we are dealing with ridiculously traffic and we need ultra high performance. Please tell/show me these numbers.... Or maybe stop logging crap you don't need to log.
Or maybe I'm wrong and we should log absolutely everything and Auth0 made the right choice given their needs (lets assume they have millions of messages a second), I still think I could make a sharded RabbitMQ go pretty far.
This goes with other technology as well. You don't need to pick hot glamorous NoSQL when Postgresql or MySQL and a tiny bit of engineering will get the job done just fine particularly when mature solutions give you such many things free out of the box (RabbitMQ gives you a ton of stuff like a cool admin UI and routing that you would have to build in ZeroMQ).