I think the biggest value I see with OpenTelemetry is the ability to instrument your code and telemetry pipeline once (using otel collector) and then choose a backend and visualisation framework which meets your requirement.

For example at SigNoz [0], we support OpenTelemetry format natively from Day 1 and use ClickHouse as the datastore layer which makes it very performant for aggregation and analytics queries.

There are alternative approaches like what Loki and Tempo does with blob storage based framework.

If your data is instrumented with Otel, you can easily switch between open source projects like SigNoz or Loki/Tempo/Grafana which IMO is very powerful.

We have seen users switch within a matter of hours from another backend to SigNoz, weh they are instrumented with Otel. This makes testing and evaluating new products super efficient.

Otherwise just the effort required to switch instrumentation to another vendor would have been enough to not ever think about evaluating another product

(Full Disclosure : I am one of the maintainers at SigNoz)

[1] https://github.com/signoz/signoz