how are you ingesting from kinesis to clickhouse. are you using some custome sink connector or processes on ec2 or lambda?
One more thing is kinesis can have duplicates while kafka is exactly once delivery.
To answer your question, though, no: in the Kafka connector, the frequency of inserts into ClickHouse is configurable relatively independent of the batch size, so you don't need massive scale for real-time CH inserts. To save you a couple hours, here's an example config for the connector:
# Snippet from connect-distributed.properties
# Max bytes per batch: 1 GB
fetch.max.bytes=1000000000
consumer.fetch.max.bytes=1000000000
max.partition.fetch.bytes=1000000000
consumer.max.partition.fetch.bytes=1000000000
# Max age per batch: 2 seconds
fetch.max.wait.ms=2000
consumer.fetch.max.wait.ms=2000
# Max records per batch: 1 million
max.poll.records=1000000
consumer.max.poll.records=1000000
# Min bytes per batch: 500 MB
fetch.min.bytes=500000000
consumer.fetch.min.bytes=500000000
If you're still deciding, I'd recommend Kafka over Kinesis because (1) it's open source so more options, e.g. self host or Confluent or AWS MSK and (2) it has a much bigger community, meaning better support, more StackOverflow answers, a plug-and-play CH Kafka connector, etc.