[nathan-io]

I'm equally surprised by your anecdote.

I found it quite simple to install RabbitMQ server and its admin panel in my WSL local dev environment.

And the cloud/prod instance took a few clicks (just spun up a DO Marketplace server image) followed by < five minutes of RabbitMQ user and firewall configuration.

It was also dead simple to start using RabbitMQ within my application. I found a well maintained package, installed it, edited a couple lines of my application's config, and everything just worked.

I specifically avoided Redis based on my understanding that it can't guarantee message persistence, so if it crashes, your unprocessed messages are lost.