All the times I've used Kafka, it's felt like the microservices confusion. A technical solution that can be taken to the extreme, when really it's a solution to a political problem.

If we break our application into small enough chunks then we start running into internal consistency issues, so we will introduce Kafka to resolve this. I'm dealing with it at the moment where my customer decided to break their crud application to CUD and R because "best practice". Now they have Kafka synchronising the two applications because it's a terrible design.