Regarding the "Durable Queueing Tradeoffs", doesn't Kafka prove you can be both durable and highly performant?
That is sort of danced around a bit in this article where the author is talking about dropped messages, etc. It is tempting to say "use a stream server" but ultimately stream servers make head-of-line accounting the consumer's responsibility. That's usually solved with some kind of (not distributed) lock.
There’s nothing inherently different about the durability of Postgres that makes it better than Kafka for implementing durable workflows. There are many reasons it’s a better choice for building a system like DBOS to implement durable workflows – ranging from ergonomics to ecosystem compatibility. But in theory you could build the same solution on Kafka, and if the company were co-founded by the Kafka creators rather than Michael Stonebraker, maybe they would have chosen that.