Seems like overkill no? Otel collectors are fairly cheap, why add expensive Kafka into the mix. If you need to buffer why not just dump to s3 or similar data store as a temporary storage array.
At that point it's very easy to sleepwalk into implementing your own database on top of s3, which is very hard to get good semantics out of - e.g. it offers essentially no ordering guarantees, and forget atomicity. For telemetry you might well be ok with fuzzy data, but if you want exact traces every time then Kafka could make sense.
The approach here is to only send data to s3 as a last ditch resort.
This is more or less exactly what WarpStream is: https://www.warpstream.com/blog/minimizing-s3-api-costs-with...
Kafka API, S3 costs and ease of use
The point is to only use s3 etc in the event of system instability. Not as a primary data transfer means.