Agreed, I find myself having to think orthogonally to common sense whenever I try to use one of its SDKs. Nothing works the way you expect it to, everything has 3 layers of unnecessary abstraction and needs to be approached via the back door. Many features have caveats about when it works, where it works, how much it works, during what phase of the moon it works and how long your strings can be when Jupiter is visible in the sky.

That said, if we disregard the leaky SDK APIs and half-implemented everything, it does somewhat deliver on the pluggability promise. Before OTel, you had bespoke stacks for everything. Now there is some commonality - you can plug in different logging backends to one standard SDK and expect it to more or less work. Yes, it works less well than a vertically integrated stack but this is still something. It enables competition and evolution piece by piece, without having to replace an observability stack outright (never going to be a convincing proposition).

So while the developer experience is pretty unpleasant and I am also disappointed with the actual daily usage, from an architectural perspective it opens up new opportunities that did not exist before. It is at least a partial win.