For me, the best way to think about Kafka is as a distributed log. That said, it does feature rather robust transformations of log entries - does KSQL count as ”queries or whatever”? https://www.confluent.io/product/ksql/
As far as I understand, KSQL is not integral part of Kafka - it is based on Kafka Streams (an independent library). So Kafka is not one system and hence some ambiguity when referring to its functionalities. In particular, "Kafka is as a distributed log" means only Kafka core, not Kafka Streams and KSQL.