Idea: automatic Kafka topic creation on deploy

The Kafka middleware currently assumes Kafka topics exist and fails if they don't. A possible improvement would be optional auto-creation of topics on first deploy, with configurable partitions and retention. This should be opt-in since many organizations control topic provisioning centrally. This is just an idea — needs discussion on whether it belongs in the middleware or the CLI.

Start by reading the Kafka middleware and the CLI deploy path to understand where topic existence is assumed and how deployment options are configured. The issue needs a decision on middleware versus CLI ownership, opt-in behavior, and configuration for partitions and retention before implementation can be considered done.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.