pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.

But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.

Yes but try putting that on your CV.

Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume.

The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.

That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.

Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.