OTel is a bear though. I think the biggest advantage it gives you is the ability to move across tracing providers
It's a nice dream. At Google Cloud Next last year, the vendors kinda of came in two buckets. Datadog, and everyone trying to replace Datadog's outrageous bills.
Nowadays they're contributing more to the project directly and have built some support to embed the collector into their DD agent. Other vendors (splunk, dynatrace, new relic, grafana, honeycomb, sumo logic, etc.) contribute to the project a bunch and typically recommend using OTel to start instead of some custom stuff from before.
I mean I understand why they did that but it really removes one of the most compelling parts about Otel. We ended doing the hard work of using the standard Otel libraries. I had to contribute a PR or two to get it all to work with our services but am glad that's the route we went because now we can switch vendors if needed (which is likely in the not too distant future in our case.