> I was considering it for something recently, but got overwhelmed by the documentation on setting up a fault-tolerant production deployment, so have been avoiding it. Was this an overreaction?

In general the defaults are pretty good I think. There is a one page production deployment guide: https://www.rabbitmq.com/production-checklist.html that I followed to replace our handbuilt cluster w/ a new automated deployment, plus a few other niceties like docker logs & rmq metrics to cloudwatch and then auto clustering via autoscaling groups lookup.

I thoroughness of the docs can perhaps seem daunting, but I see it as a badge of quality and especially if you are growing it's usage organically it should "just work".