You can use TCP and other mechanisms for guaranteed delivery. Like, almost all LIDR logging across the planet uses TCP syslog, which is durable and attestable to in courts.
TCP alone won't get you there. It's certainly not durable in and of itself. All TCP can do is ensure that streamed data is received in the correct order, and confirm that a segment's data was successfully placed into the right buffer on the receiver side. You also need immutable storage, stronger integrity checks than what TCP itself provides, and many other requirements I haven't researched in a while.
If you truly believe OTel is a “baby fart,” I’d recommend you go to SRECon, KubeCon, and other similar conferences and make your opinion loudly known. Nobody talks about syslog there, and these are big and well-respected companies represented there.
Syslog is mature and battle tested for what it is: schlepping unstructured plaintext logs from one place to another. It’s not really purpose-built to meet the needs of a full-fledged observability solution, though, of which logs are but a component.