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You're conflating Apache Kafka, the distributed log and Kafka Streams, the streaming library built by Confluent that leverages Apache Kafka.

Kafka itself is straightforward to grasp, Kafka Streams, yep, your concerns sound familiar.

Kafka Streams is a core part of the open-source Apache Kafka project.

You may be mistaking it for kSQL, or ksqlDB as they call it now, which is a Confluent project built on top of Kafka Streams.

Be that as it may, I agree with the spirit of the grand-parent comment, which is that if you stick to straightforward Pub/Sub Kafka works great.

It is, but it's ancillary to Kafka the distributed log.