Kafka also has a KIP to get rid of Zookeeper and I see a bunch of the issues related to the KIP resolved and looks like it should be happening this year.
Doesn't this just internalize the dependency within the project itself? Isn't Redpanda taking on all the effort that Zookeeper has been doing for years, all the edge cases, all the additional support and now the coupling of it within the very project itself?
That is our essential complexity. If you are trying to replicate data to machines, you need to replicate data to machines. We chose raft as the only way. In essence we are much simpler than upstream w.r.t protocols for data replication.
This is exactly the point. One more dependency, one more executable. Redpanda get rid of that.