I know I’ve already asked everyone’s opinion/experience with KRaft. Seems like not too many people have experimented yet… Let’s change that!
Here’s a great write-up of KRaft, how it works in place or Zookeeper, and an easy guide to get started on your own!
Why should I try it out? I know it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem but as long as production is run with Zookeeper I don’t know why I should give it a try.
At some point, Kafka will be an entirely Zookeeperless system, so this will eventually catch up with you. The time will come when production Zookeeper will eventually not exist anymore, but of course that that doesn’t mean you need to be playing with preview versions. We are always excited about trying out new things, but you’re the one responsible for a production deployment, so your schedule wins over our enthusiasm. 
I can run the all-in-one demo in KRaft mode, but then I can’t connect to it from localhost with kafka-topics or any other client.
Are you using Docker for Mac maybe? The KAFKA_LISTENERS and KAFKA_ADVERTIZED_LISTENERS expect docker to be reachable via localhost. Depending on how you set thing up, that might need to be changed.