Kafka is a disease.
It's a queue, it's a stream, it's a journal, it's an event bus, it's a database.
It's also apparently a workflow engine now?
It annoys me so much how appealing this is to a median developer. "Wow I just get to learn this one tool and then I can use it for EVERYTHING!" is not something competent craftsmen/professionals do in any other field, yet in software it's all the rage.
"The way we are building event-driven applications is misguided"
Maybe the way you are! Don't overcomplicate/overabstract things so much!