I know you can export directly to the backend, but the collector typically uses less than 50MB of RAM in my experience (even when handling lots of traces) and it's pretty easy to add sidecars to however you deploy your backends nowadays. Using Grafana SaaS metrics could look a little spiky or generally weirder without the collector, but normal with it, so I just default to using it now.

It's the shame the docs on it are still quite bad. The example config in the article here does look almost identical to the one we use everywhere, just without the redact, and should probably be pasted somewhere into the official docs.

Every provider seems to produce their own soft fork of the collector for branding (eg Alloy, ADOT, etc) and slightly changes the configuration, which doesn't help.

The docs are open to contributions! Anybody can add better examples.