I feel like "and while it does require a little tuning around performance occasionally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there :)

Honestly though my only experience with RabbitMQ has been as a backend for Celery (background task processor for Python) and I think my real issues are mostly to do with how Celery uses RabbitMQ in a very poor default setup.

Message confirmations are off by default and turning them on caused our queues to grind to a halt. Queues being single threaded and clusters don't much help with that without using some kind of sharding plugin. It seemed like getting to a good spot required a lot of arcane knowledge that wasn't so easy to find.

"Configuring RabbitMQ to be a performant message queue for background task systems" would be an excellent blog post I would share widely!