Guozhang Wang explains the decision-making behind a major change in Apache Kafka:
Why replace ZooKeeper with an internal log for Apache Kafka® metadata management? This post explores the rationale behind the replacement, examines why a quorum-based consensus protocol like Raft was utilized and altered to become KRaft, and describes the new Quorum Controller built on top of KRaft protocols.
Click through for the reasoning, which includes a considerably faster shutdown in large environments..