I did our migration from StatsD to OTEL because our third party StatsD service was getting flaky. The first person from OPs to get to me pushed OTEL. The rest were fine with Prometheus and it was late in the process before they realized what had happened. I believe if we had gone straight to Prometheus I would have been done in half the time and solved half the problems I had to solve anyway for OTEL. If someone had to replace it again in the future I fully believe it would have taken cumulatively as much time to go StatsD->Prometheus->OTEL as it took to go StatsD->OTEL, especially when you consider that OTEL is not quite baked.

Meanwhile functionality to retain and recruit new customers sat in the backlog.

Edit to add: also regarding the perf issues I saw: do you really want to pay for an extra server or half a server in your cluster just in case some day comes? These decisions were much fuzzier when you ordered hardware once every two years and just had to live with the capacity you got.

It's not a "scam", the protocols and clients are 100% scrutable. Not sure why you used that word.