Oh no. Now what should I use? I can't believe something that's actively in development is considered dead these days. Surely there's a better alternative with as good or better community support, right? Right...?
That said, OTel is far from being easy to adopt still, and despite a lot of us trying hard to change that, it's got a long way to go. If you're using one of the "major" languages (Java, .NET, JS, Python) then it's pretty easy to set up automatic instrumentation and a Collector that you can tee off to your preferred backend analysis tool. But if you need more context from your apps, manual instrumentation outside of tracing is pretty hit-or-miss, and you need to build up a vocabulary around concepts (Resources, attributes, baggage, context, spans, etc.) that isn't easy unless you've got the time to sink into it. It's extremely powerful and has the building blocks to let you capture just about any data you need, pluggable processors and exporters, etc. -- but these building blocks are very unevenly composed into easy-to-use, turnkey-ish components that a lot of people ultimately want.
There are tons of startups and other not-fortune-x00 orgs benefitting from what OTel provides. Your claim that OTel is irrelevant outside fortune-x00 cos is very clearly not true.