[andrewmutz]

It's not necessarily over-engineering because scaling/performance isn't the only reason to want to be doing things asynchronously. In the example given, they could want to be decoupling consumers and producers from each other.

For example, they could have one service using CDC (his DB source connector) to propagate state out to a bunch of other systems and not know which systems are subscribing for changes.

An organization could have many such systems propagating state out to many other systems, using a single distributed log system.