OTel Isn't Going Well (And I Made A Spreadsheet About It)
OpenTelemetry's struggles stem from a three-way collision: a binary stability gate that makes marking features as stable irreversible, a small maintainer bench, and an enormous scope spanning dozens of languages and frameworks. This creates perverse incentives to endlessly debate potential problems rather than ship, leaving languages like Python and JavaScript years behind Go and .NET. The result is a steep cliff between magical auto-instrumentation and painful manual instrumentation, making OTel a risky bet for smaller teams without dedicated observability engineering bandwidth.