What I wonder is how often the "remove" operation happens. I'd wager it's more likely there are many services doing variations of the same thing, but existing ones are hard to kill because there is a web of dependencies.
That doesn't mean it never provided value, just that there are now better alternatives.
I call this the "You're doing it wrong" Theory of Architectural Deficiency: anything that appears to be a fundamental architectural issue is actually just you being an idiot.
For examples, see every discussion about REST ever.
Uber's github shows lots of work on opentracing, so if that's widely deployed then the remove operation is a straightforward.