Seems like many people are not familiar with openresty off which kong is based.
Kong is like an enterpise version of openresty, i.e nginx turbo-charged with luajit. A lot of really cool and performant things can be built on top of it.
At a previous place we wanted to implement an auth & rate limiting ingress to a consul based service discovery.
We looked at kong but in the end rolled our own using openresty.
No one on the team really liked the ”centralised” approach used by kong. It’s probably preferred in an older schooled enterprise setting tho (awesome project non the less!)