I agree with your viewpoint. The crux of the matter is not whether to use tiered storage or not, but what trade-offs have been made in the specific storage architecture and what benefits have been gained. Here(https://github.com/AutoMQ/automq?tab=readme-ov-file#-automq-...) is a qualitative comparison chart of streaming systems including kafka/confluent/redpanda/warpstream/automq. This comparison chart does not have specific numerical comparisons, but purely based on their trade-offs at the storage level, I think this will be of some use to you.
