Where-as tracing instrumentation is fantastically good at showing where response time is being spent, showing what's getting hit. And it comes with no developer cost; the automatic instrumentation runs & does it all.
Ideally you also throw in some. additional tags onto the root-entry-span or current span. That takes some effort. But then it should be consistently & widely available & visible.
Tracing is very hard to get orgs culturally on board with. And there are some operational challenges but personally I think you are way over-selling how hard it is... There are just a colossal collection of softwares that serve as really good export destinations, and your team can probably already operate one or two quite well.
It does get a lot more complex if you want longer term storage. Personally I'm pro mixing systems observability with product performance tracking stuff, so yes you do need to keep some data indefinitely. And that can be hugely problematic: either trying to juggle storage and querying for infinitely growing data, or building systems to aggregate & persist the data & derived metrics, you need while getting rid of the base data.
But I just can't emphasize enough how badly most orgs are at logs and how not worth anyone's time it so to invest in something manual like that that offers so much less than the alternative (traces).