The alternative is vendor lockin, $$$, and spotty support for complex environments with zero chance of ever getting 100% coverage.

At least with Open Telemetry, anyone can write an OTLP "source" using free, open specifications, and it'll "just work" with dozens of third-party "sinks". That's huge!

Sure, there's a lot of experimental tags on semantic conventions, but at the end of the day, that's not that critical. It's just data: most sinks don't "interpret" these tags, they just display them as-is, so changes aren't breaking changes.