> how else are you supposed to interpret it?

It's not so hard. You interpret it how it is written. Yes, they say one camp chases buzzwords and another chases common sense. Critique that if you want to. That's fine.

But what's not written in the OP is some sort of claim that Postgres performs better than Kafka. The opposite is written. The OP acknowledges that Kafka is fast. Right there in the title! What's written is OP's experiments and data that shows Postgres is slow but can be practical for people who don't need Kafka. Honestly I don't see anything bewildering about it. But if you think they're wrong about Postgres being slow but practical that's something nice to talk about. What's not nice is to post snarky comments insinuating that the OP is asking you to design unscalable solutions.

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status says everything's fine! Any place I can read more about this outage?

>> If you don't need what kafka offers, don't use it.

> This is literally the point the author is making.

Exactly! I just don't understand why HN invariably always tends to bubble up the most dismissive comments to the top that don't even engage with the actual subject matter of the article!

That wasn't their point. Instead of posting snarky comments, please review the site guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

And if the OP hadn't done that, someone here would complain, why couldn't the OP use a larger CPU and test if Postgres performs better? Really, there is no way the OP can win here, can they?

I'm glad the OP benchmarked on the 96 vCPU server. So now I know how well Postgres performs on a large CPU. Not very well. But if the OP had done their benchmark on a low CPU, I wouldn't have learned this.