The goal of the outbox pattern is at-least-once publishing though, not only-once. You either get P + (eventually) at least one copy of K, or you get no P and no K.
Without the outbox you can get P without K or K without P, which lead to consumers out of sync with the producer.
This requires the consumer to be able to deal with repeated events to some extent, but you usually want that anyway, since an event can be processed twice even if it appears only once in the topic. For instance if the consumer crashes after processing but before updating the offset.
> The goal of the outbox pattern is at-least-once publishing though, not only-once.
Right, which is why it's an unacceptable solution to 'transacting over postgres and Kafka', and why I wouldn't want to work for a company that wants me to believe differently.
I think you're just using "transaction" in a different sense than what the interviewer meant; "guarantee that an event happened in addition to a database update" sounds like at-least-once to me, and it's normally what you would want in this kind of system.
Without the outbox you can get P without K or K without P, which lead to consumers out of sync with the producer.
This requires the consumer to be able to deal with repeated events to some extent, but you usually want that anyway, since an event can be processed twice even if it appears only once in the topic. For instance if the consumer crashes after processing but before updating the offset.