I'm on a stack that also uses lambdas an event bridge, I think the OP means that the stresses originating from k8s and Kafka are gone when using lambdas and event bridge.

Indeed, that is exactly what I mean. There are some caveats though -- eventbridge doesn't give strict ordering or exactly-once delivery, so some work is needed to make idempotent consumers, etc. But, on aggregate, it's still much much easier than managing all the infrastructure that k8s and kafka requires.