After working with NATS, I wouldn't want to touch Kafka even with a long stick. Its just too complex and a memory hog for no good reason. It doesn't have all the features that NATS supports as well.

What about the Kafka V2, Pulsar?

Kafka is far from trivial to operate, for one thing, even post zookeeper.

And it's kinda wrong to use as a queue (in most cases), being a log stream you can seek in.