You are correct — wide events are essentially equivalent to structured logs. Charity Majors says as much in her blog post linked at the top of this article.

> The building block of o11y 2.0 is wide, structured log events

Wide events and structured logs are often used interchangeably. One caveat is that in "wide, structured log events" you're only emitting one [giant] log for each request coming through your service. In contrast, I still see many people using structured logs but in the "old fashioned" way of emitting multiple log lines per request.