Full disaggregation of compute and storage is the right direction. Let storage handle replication, it's getting good, global, low latency, cheaper (like with S3 Express). Kafka becomes a smart data ingester and router: it moves bytes, enforces ordering, does minimal buffering. That's it. Do one thing well.

You get a system simpler to operate, to scale, and more flexible; data could be consumed outside of Kafka itself (in a batch way typically), without duplicating the data, that's a big win.