A critical regression was included in kafka-clients 2.6.1, which is now fixed and cherry picked [1].
For some devs, it is not easy (or they are not allowed by their enterprise) to move up to a new release, even a minor release (2.7). Devs are often allowed to upgrade to patch releases without approval, though. There seems to be some reticence to getting 2.6.2 out ASAP, due to the effort needed; I understand that a full release of everything is not trivial, but could consideration be given to releasing, say, 2.6.1.1 for just the kafka-clients jar with this fix? Thanks. [1]: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/9947#issuecomment-767798579
