Agreed. It has become a tool just like any other. Just like nobody writes about how they use virtual machines in the cloud anymore.

This is the answer. I'd wager that almost every distributed system that runs at scale uses message queues in some capacity.

I think that's definitely part of it. Two roles ago my team was invested heavily in SQS and Kinesis. The role before that and my current role are pretty heavy with Kafka still.

I wouldn't call their use super interesting, though.

The last role was simply because the business required as close to real time message processing as possible for billing analytics. But if I tell someone that, it's not incredibly interesting unless I start diving into messages per second and such.

Yep. It’s a really nice architecture for lots of use cases where it fits.

Every new idea goes through the same cycle of overuse until it finds its niches.

Yeah, this is the most likely reason.

It used to be popular to post about rewriting angular to react. Now everyone just uses react (or they write posts about rewriting react to vue or whatever the flavor of the month)