Getting messages in the right order in distributed systems can be tricky.

Hey everyone, I'm wrestling with a problem in a distributed system. Keeping message order strict is super important for data integrity. We're using Kafka for our message queue, but with lots of consumers and partitions, making sure messages get processed in the exact order they were sent across different partitions seems tricky. Has anyone run into this and figured out good ways to handle it, other than just using a single partition (which really slows things down)? I'm looking for real-world advice or common approaches.