OTel's real bottleneck isn't the spec. It's the fact that it requires you to instrument the app itself. That couples your performance to the maturity of the least stable SDK you depend on.

eBPF solves this by reversing the model: instrument the system, not the application. Turn it on / off dynamically, zero redeploys, minimal overhead.

The missing piece is accessibility. Kernel-level observability exists; "normal engineers can use it" and good DX does not.