> I built this because running Kafka locally for development is painful — gigabytes of RAM, slow startup, ZooKeeper/KRaft configuration. I just wanted something that accepts produce requests and gets out of the way.

This is not true. Kafka's latest `-native` images are very fast to start up (~100ms) and use relatively little memory.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-974%3A...