OTOH, the author is correct that it's more work to set up and maintain than non-distributed software. Don't introduce it unless you have carefully considered alternatives.
I became de facto responsible for running a small Kafka cluster at a small company that could have gotten away with something less shiny. That was not fun. (Especially since the company started with Kafka 0.8 and encountered many changes along the way to modern releases). Eventually the company ponied up for Confluent to take over running Kafka for us as a service. Now I'm back to enjoying the nice Kafka APIs without having to deal with the annoying Kafka servers.
I like the Kafka API/capabilities but dislike running actual Kafka servers. If I were to start a one-man venture that needed event streaming I'd probably try Redpanda [1]. Its developer hangs out here, which is how I first learned of it. It's supposed to implement Kafka service but with no Zookeeper or JVM knowledge needed to run it. I wouldn't even consider running the original Apache Kafka for a solo/small team.