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If there are alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing, what were they? The purpose of this section is to motivate why the design is the way it is and not some other way.

Originally it was proposed in KIP-82 - Add Record Headers that by supporting headers would resolve this issue as then there would be no need for message wrappers. As per its discussion it got agreed that we should address the compaction based on null value seperately as discussed here.