> not to mention nearly 50% of every packet was literally packet headers

I was just looking at a similar issue with grpc-go, where it would somehow send a HEADERS frame, a DATA frame, and a terminal HEADERS frame in 3 different packets. The grpc server is a golang binary (lightstep collector), which definitely disables Nagle's algorithm as shown by strace output, and the flag can't be flipped back via the LD_PRELOAD trick (e.g. with a flipped version of https://github.com/sschroe/libnodelay) as the binary is statically linked.

I can't reproduce this with a dummy grpc-go server, where all 3 frames would be sent in the same packet. So I can't blame Nagle's algorithm, but I am still not sure why the lightstep collector behaves differently.