Yep. I'm not personally a huge fan of the kafka API — I think it's simultaneously too low level for normal users and too high level to deeply integrate into other systems (like stream processing engines), and requires a complex client library to use effectively.

We went with a simpler and more user friendly consume API, that also allows much higher levels of read parallelism (particularly important if you're using something like Workers, which parallelize well but aren't very powerful individually).

But we know many companies are invested in the Kafka ecosystem, and we want to provide an easy on (and if necessary, off) ramp for them.