I took a lot of inspiration from Debezium - at the time they required the wal2json plugin (not sure if that's still the case?). I didn't have an option to install the plugin and I mostly wanted a websocket-friendly implementation to replace Firebase.
And if I'm 100% honest I just wanted to make something i thought was cool
Very similar to what you are doing but instead of Websockets you can decide where to send your data. The core-debezium sends it to Kafka.