In case the consumer has the wrong leader of a partition, it will issue a metadata request. The Metadata request can be handled by any node, so clients know afterwards which broker are the designated leader for the topic partitions. Produce and consume requests can only be sent to the node hosting partition leader.

Increasing partitions increasesparallelism, but also means:
* Consumers in a group may have to handlemore partitions, especially if the number of consumers is lower than the number of partitions.
* This can result inincreased lag, especially under high load.
FromKafka Topic Management Docs:
"Increasing the number of partitions increases consumer work, and if consumers can't keep up, lag can accumulate."
* A is false:existing data is not redistributed.
* B is false:records with the same key always map to the same partitionbased on hash.
* D is not directly impacted by the partition count.
Reference:Kafka Topic Management > Adding Partitions

You cannot have more sink tasks (= consumers) than the number of partitions, so 2.

Latest means that data retrievals will start from where the offsets currently end

unclean.leader.election.enable=true allows non ISR replicas to become leader, ensuring availability but losing consistency as data loss will occur