Technology moves fast and is prone to hype. While NoSQL and Kafka were certainly oversold, almost every mid-large scale tech company has at least one nosql system and kafka-like system in use. The proponents weren’t wrong, they oversold the impact.

There is other tech that did completely change how we do things. CI/CD, Containers, Kubernetes, distributed tracing etc. are considered standard now (but weren’t not that long ago).