I haven’t played Factorio, and have just barely used Kafka. Therefore, if there was any subtlety, it was lost on me. Nonetheless, this article was clear. I thought this cute and I liked it, but I’m not sure that I gained any new insights into Kafka. This is not a criticism!
However, one of the main advantages of Kafka, I thought, was that it’s so much more than a queue, since data is replayable, etc. The article does mention this as a shortcoming of the analogy, but isn’t this one of the main selling points vs other message queues?