4 years ago at work we compared Kafka to alternatives and ended up using it. In my opinion the only reason for using Kafka is that you need a very very highly performant message queue. It had bad usability at the time and some very annoying undocumented behaviour (e.g. there was no official guide or feature to permanently remove a node).

It feels like whenever Kafka developers had to make any tradeoffs they chose performance over everything else. I would only ever use it again if I the sheer data volume makes it impossible to use an alternative.