You're literally describing what we've built at https://www.inngest.com/. I don't want to talk about us much in this post, but it's so relevant it's hard not to bring it up. (Huge disclaimer here, I'm the co-founder).

In this case, we give you global event streams with a durable workflow engine that any language (currently Typescript, Python, Go, Elixir) can hook into. Each step (or invocation) is backed by a lightweight queue, so queues are cheap and are basically a 1LOC wrapper around your existing code. Steps run as atomic "transactions" which must commit or be retried within a function, and are as close to exactly once as you could get.