^^ And if it is still required, does anyone know if any team has successfully found a workaround to avoid the confluent schema registry dependency?

I’ve heard from some folks that they have successfully used Karapace as a drop-in replacement for Schema Registry, but I’m not sure what the tradeoffs look like... @prehistoric-dawn-23569 do you have any insight/thoughts you can share?

Hello, very little insight, to be honest with you. Karapace just works for us. We have it running on a dedicated VM with pretty much the default settings and I've barely had to think about it. It's technically a single point-of-failure for us, being a single host, but it's been solid as far as I am aware.