"perf trace" has improved since I wrote that, and may well be mostly strace-equivalent (but without crippling overhead) in the latest Linux.
I often run ftrace, perf, and eBPF on our production instances for syscall tracing. If I ran strace, the instance would suddenly be very slow, and it would trigger Hysterix (and other) timeouts and be removed from the ASG and auto terminated. Our environment is fault-tolerant, so yes, we can run strace -- you just don't get much output, and the load vanishes from the instance you are looking at.
Do newer versions of `perf trace` expose these?
Are you referring to that it makes syscalls slow, or is it about something else?
Yours is a very superior treatment of the strace topic.