Agree. We did a recent migration from Kafka (Confluent Platform) to OSS Pulsar for a near identical use case and couldn't have been happier - we've saved costs, improved uptime, and reduced errors. We found it much easier to manage Pulsar ourselves with automation that it mostly removed the need to use a managed Kafka service (we've tried solutions from AWS, Confluent, and Aiven).
The only downside with Pulsar (which is constantly improving) was that community support for teething issues was a bit slower than what we saw with Kafka.