As someone who helps administer several kafka clusters which carry millions of messages per second, and works with both DBs and DBAs, the shallowness of the author's complaints seemed to belie a lack of experience and understanding of either technology. If they gave even a small amount of detail, it might have been useful:
"We couldn’t create a Kafka source connector from the database holding the messages" – Why couldn't they?
"we had extreme difficulty troubleshooting when their system refused our best understanding of said custom headers" – What made this so extremely difficult for them?
"Authentication with Kafka, and authentication to encrypt confidential data in Kafka, and getting the Avro schema from the schema registry were all separate and painful steps" – These are 3 totally unrelated features, so of course they each have settings. What made the steps so painful for them?
"We would never tolerate this level of complexity with a database" the author says of configuring kafka features, apparently missing that a database setup with all those features (external authentication, encryption, custom serialization) also requires "separate" configuration for each one.
"We couldn’t create a Kafka source connector from the database holding the messages" – Why couldn't they?
"we had extreme difficulty troubleshooting when their system refused our best understanding of said custom headers" – What made this so extremely difficult for them?
"Authentication with Kafka, and authentication to encrypt confidential data in Kafka, and getting the Avro schema from the schema registry were all separate and painful steps" – These are 3 totally unrelated features, so of course they each have settings. What made the steps so painful for them?
"We would never tolerate this level of complexity with a database" the author says of configuring kafka features, apparently missing that a database setup with all those features (external authentication, encryption, custom serialization) also requires "separate" configuration for each one.