It's great to see my name mentioned here, cheered me up as I'm not having a good weekend. It feels like a lifetime ago since I got to work on this and parquet-rs.
Yeah, I agree with the conclusion on Kafka here. Kafka is a very resource-heavy application that's worth replacing with leaner options.
Oxbow seems very interesting, I presume it's designed to forward data that trickles into some S3 bucket as parquet data?