I've been watching Redpanda for a couple years primarily because I'm interested in their wasm data transformations. In the past 3 months I've heard it mentioned several dozen times by other teams in our company, vs. maybe 2-3 times in the >1y prior. So something seems in the air, and presumably Confluent has noticed.
I'm not sure why, Kafka per se doesn't seem to have really dropped any significant balls lately (and we're self-hosted so Confluent isn't very relevant).