In my case it would have been an issue regardless of what the queue/pubsub tech was (talking on-prem, not GCP Pubsub or AWS, which would just chug along effortlessly, not care, and take our money), since the entire consumer stack was toast and dumping unprocessed data was a no-no. The real issue there was my manager not having a spine coupled with not allowing my team to do its job autonomously. Even with the wonky setup we had it would have been dead simple to chain additional clusters. Stupid but easy with the automation we had built.

However, adding another Kafka or Pulsar node would have been much easier.