Jim Galasyn gives up the ghost:
Is Windows your favorite development environment? Do you want to run Apache Kafka® on Windows? Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), now you can, and with fewer tears than in the past. Windows still isn’t the recommended platform for running Kafka with production workloads, but for trying out Kafka, it works just fine. Let’s take a look at how it’s done.
There was a time in which running Kafka on Windows meant downloading Windows-specific installers, workaround executables to deal with NTFS, and all the attendant problems of being the third operating system on the list. Using WSL2 is definitely a better approach.