For us, delivering an on-prem commercial off the shelf solution, it was untenable to expect the customer IT team to operate a separate, relatively huge piece of tech (remember, this is 2014). Maybe the heuristics would be different today with K8s and advancement of Kafka. But ZeroMQ as an in-process, distributed messaging layer is dead simple. If your use case requires anything else on top of that, it's on the team to design the right solution like resiliency, statefulness, etc.

For a high throughput, distributed compute focused use case, I think ZMQ is still a great choice for coordinating execution. But Kafka and other options on the market now are great choices for higher order abstractions.