Is Flink used that much? Last time I've seen it in the "news" it was related to Adobe's CMS, which, well, doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation, so it suffered a bit by association.
And boy, Kafka more and more seems like an early warning system for architecture astronautics. (Not necessarily bad by itself, but often part of hectoliters of manure poured in size 6 wellies)
Flink is used quite a lot in prod in global and there are so many gems in it as well regarding streaming processing and it is still probably state of the art in streaming processing. Timeplus Proton stands on the giant shoulders (Flink is definitely one of them), and tries to provide an easier / more resource efficient solution via (ClickHouse) database technologies. PS, I am one of the contributors of Timeplus Proton, so could be biased.
And boy, Kafka more and more seems like an early warning system for architecture astronautics. (Not necessarily bad by itself, but often part of hectoliters of manure poured in size 6 wellies)