Also, since you talked above about the "lack of documentation" to get up and running with a small Kafka deployment of only 1 broker and 1 ZK instance: this is covered in the Kafka quickstart, which is probably what most people will read when starting out with Kafka. See https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#quickstart.

Perhaps you had a different issue though?

Why don't you run Kafka from a Docker image, like the Docker images provided by Confluent?https://docs.confluent.io/current/installation/docker/docs/