Kafka isn’t a queue, it’s a distributed log. A partitioned topic can take very large volumes of message writes, persist them indefinitely, deliver them to any subscriber in-order and at-least-once (even for subscribers added after the message was published), and do all of that distributed and HA.
If you need all those things, there just are not a lot of options.
If you need all those things, there just are not a lot of options.