We had previously made extensive use of Sarama, another pure-go implementation of the Kafka protocol. After the third or fourth time where I had to use Wireshark to debug a protocol-level bug we figured it would probably be better to use the librdkafka-based library to have better protocol support.

Plus the team running our brokers found that the Sarama clients were a drag on them being able to enable broker features like zstd compression (although I understand Sarama has zstd now). This felt like it was going to be a kind of problem that would keep cropping up.