Take a startup with a few users. The senior engineer decides they need pub/sub to ship a new feature. With Kafka, the team goes to learn about Kafka best practices, choose client libraries, and learn the Kafka quirks. They also need to spin up Kafka instances. They ship it in a month.
With postgres, they’ve got an MVP in a day, and shipped within a week.
And the next week they realize they want reader processes to block until there is work to do. Oops that's not supported. Now you have to code that feature yourself... and soon you're reinventing Kafka.