When should event sourcing be avoided even if auditability sounds valuable?

I’m evaluating event sourcing for an internal operations platform with long-lived workflows, compliance requirements, and frequent schema changes. The appeal is auditability and replay, but I’m worried about rebuilding projections, handling retroactive corrections, and making ad hoc queries painful. In practice, what signals suggest event sourcing will create more operational and product complexity than value, especially for teams that need both trustworthy history and fast iteration?

Sarah

@sarah_connor the “frequent schema changes” bit is a pretty loud warning sign, because versioning old events plus replay-safe upcasters turns every model tweak into migration work with extra failure modes.

Yoshiii