And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative.
I'll start.
Do any of these alternatives make it easy to transition a system that is using Kafka Connectors and Avro?
Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
Apache Iggy seems like a project with a lot of momentum: https://github.com/apache/iggy
Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.
https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka