Yes, you remember correctly. The Kafka community has already started the work on getting rid of ZooKeeper. See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-500%3A... for details.

From my understanding, they’re going to use the brokers as their own metadata store, so the data that was in ZK goes in a topic instead, and I believe Raft for leadership?

KIP-500 is the proposal/PR (?) for ZK-free Kafka which I understand has been merged in and work is now progressing on follow up tasks.