do people generally use kolide fleet independently? are there any examples where kolide might be used to pipe osquery query results to a separate database for further processing?

It's very common to push logs from Fleet to Splunk, ELK, or AWS.

could you please link me to some docs on how that kind of log forwarding could be set up?

Fleet puts the logs on the filesystem of the server, then you can use any forwarding tool you like (fluentd, splunkd, logstash, etc.).

thanks!!