RisingWave Community - Can I use the Kafka source connector to analyze data in a similar fashion as streaming into PostGres with generic tables?

The Kafka source connector does not natively support creating generic tables with specific columns like in PostGres.
However, you can create a source like normal and use a view to convert the payload to JSONB and kafka_key.
The support for kafka_ts and kafka_headers is not available yet, but it is actively being worked on.
If you need to read kafka key and value, you can refer to the upcoming release v1.6.0 of RisingWave, which will include this feature.
The official documentation for this feature will be available in v1.7.0.
You can refer to an example in the RisingWave repository for including the key in the source connector: Example Link