There's a lot of logic involved client side regarding managing read cursors and marking events as processed consumer side. Possibly also client side error queues and so on.

I truly miss a good standard client side library following the Kafka-in-SQL philosophy. I started on in my previous job and we used it internally but it never got good enough that it would be widely used elsewhere, and now I work somewhere else...

(PS: Talking about the pub/sub Kafka-like usecase, not the work queue FOR UPDATE usecase)