For long time, Kafka is trying to get rid of Zookeeper. Is Zookeeper use deprecated for Kafka last versions? Or it is still required for a Kafka cluster?
KIP 500 is for removing Zookeeper dependency. Currently the newest version of Kafka has not removed it. You can view the list of KIP and the version of Kafka that implements them here. No Kafka version is specified for KIP 500.
--Updates ---
Zookeeper is removed
Brokers that are in ZK mode store their metadata in Apache ZooKepeer. This is the old mode of handling metadata.
Brokers that are in KRaft mode store their metadata in a KRaft quorum. This is the new and improved mode of handling metadata.
https://kafka.apache.org/39/documentation.html#kraft_zk_migration