[rcombatwombat]

Still not what I would call 'proper' queuing (IMHO!) because ultimately it's still just Kafka and just append only: you can't 'atomically acknowledge+delete' individual messages anywhere in the stream, you only dealing with offsets and that's a fundamental thing that has many consequences (e.g. you don't get ordering between batches) and also means that you will get re-deliveries in some scenarios that you would not have with a system that implements proper queuing.