My sense from the few projects I've seen attempt to use Druid is that there is quite a lot of infrastructure overhead / DevOps support required to manage a cluster at scale, and that fairly complex ingestion pipelines are required to load the data in the right format.

Anecdotally, I've heard that ClickHouse is easier to deploy from this perspective with similar performance, but would love to get others views / experience with these and similar data stores.

I run a ClickHouse cluster. I’ve heard Druid is more difficult, but ClickHouse isn’t exactly a piece of cake. It’s great for a while, but sometimes you can get bitten by weird states. Still, compared to everything I’ve used, for the use case where it excels, it really excels.

clickhouse is difficult to operate and does support join well, i use https://github.com/apache/doris replace our clickhouse and druid workloads