That only makes sense if the instrumentation overhead itself is significant. But, for a efficient recording implementation that should only really start being a problem when your average span is ~1 us.
This is all noise when you are trying to debug more common issues than your FS being too slow.
+ also storage cost. Most vendors charge by Mb stored or span recorded.
For that matter, why are a few hundred spans a problem? Are the visualizers that poor? I usually use function tracing where hundreds of millions to billions of spans per second are the norm and there is no difficulty managing or understanding those.
I do not do cloud or web development, so this is just totally alien. I generate multi-gigabyte logs with billions of events for just seconds of execution and get to slice them however I want when doing performance analysis. The inability to even process your own logs seems crazy.