That's not the issue here. Kafka is far more fragile than it should be, partly because companies have always approached it as cluster-first and partly because it's enterprise-first software where high setup costs just aren't important. A lot of JVM software ends up like this - there's a big chunk of fiddly O(1) work in getting it all going, just because no-one ever bothers to make it all easy to get started with.

I say this as a huge fan of Kafka, but things like MySQL have better defaults and are easier to get running out of the box, and there's no reason Kafka's starting experience couldn't be the same if someone cared enough to put the time and effort in. And ultimately it's a shame, because it leads people to ignore something that's a much better model and platform in the long term.