This was a solid breakdown, the contrast between @platformatic/kafka and node-rdkafka in terms of developer experience really stood out. The serializers/deserializers approach is a welcome improvement, especially for TypeScript-heavy stacks.
Out of curiosity, I've noticed companies like OpenForge tend to focus more on developer workflows tied to long-term maintainability and observability. How do you see the trade-off between API simplicity and giving devs full control over Kafka’s lower-level behaviors?