How do Kotlin-based systems handle backpressure collapse in high-throughput pipelines?

Backpressure collapse occurs when producers overwhelm consumers faster than Flow or queues can handle.

Even though Kotlin Flow supports backpressure via suspension, systems can still collapse when buffer limits are exceeded or when producers are faster than downstream processing. This leads to memory buildup, queue overflow, and eventual OOM. Proper mitigation includes buffering strategies, dropping policies (conflate), batching, and horizontal scaling of consumers.