Making mental model for Kafka

I always get lost when trying to understand concepts like Kafka and messaging queues. Because before diving into a new technology or system, it's crucial for me to have a holistic view of how it works. The same challenge arises when I'm learning about Kafka.
However, recently on Discord in a private server, someone explained Kafka so clearly that it finally made sense to me. Here's how they explained it

well its not a detailed post on kafka but to make a picture of it

Asynchronous messaging plays a pivotal role in modern software architecture, particularly when it comes to decoupling components and improving response times. By leveraging message queues, we can separate the generation of events (producer) from their processing (consumer) in a highly efficient manner.

Consider a scenario where a user signs up on a platform, triggering multiple tasks such as sending emails or performing checks with external services (TaskA, TaskB, TaskC). If these tasks were handled synchronously, the system would have to wait for all tasks to finish before responding to the user, leading to increased response times.

However, adopting an asynchronous approach with a message queue allows us to queue these tasks and promptly respond to the user without waiting for task completion. This significantly reduces response times as tasks are processed independently by consumers, which could be services like mail servers or external check handlers.

One of the prominent tools in this domain is Kafka, widely utilized in streaming applications and microservices architecture. For instance, when an event occurs in serviceA (e.g., a product order), serviceA can publish this event to Kafka. Other services responsible for tasks like inventory management or order processing can then consume these events from Kafka, thus decoupling serviceA from the rest of the system. This decoupling enables scalable and flexible architectures where services can communicate seamlessly without being tightly coupled.