Event streaming vs request-response for real-time dashboards

we have an analytics dashboard that currently polls an api every 5 seconds for updates. the data is relatively small, but the polling traffic adds up. we're debating whether to switch to an event streaming model using websockets, sse, or graphql subscriptions, possibly bridged from kafka. my question is, for data that's acceptable to be 5-10 seconds stale, is the polling approach *actually* problematic? or is the engineering effort to move to a real-time streaming solution an over-optimization? i hear a lot about the benefits of real-time, but sometimes a simple polling mechanism is just... simpler and good enough. what factors do you consider when deciding if polling is acceptable, or if a full real-time streaming architecture is truly necessary for a dashboard?