I don't think anyone opposes that, but I don't think that's your "core claim". Your core claim is that this is a huge problem, one that makes OpenTelemetry "a technological dead-end", and that "the whole ball game is about capturing and constraining the cardinality of that metadata".

That is what it would be nice to have you justify some more. After all, the same could be said of logs, or internal traffic when using microservices/DBMS (request cardinality/traffic will be multiplied).

I count about a dozen claims, so I'm not really sure what to begin with. But I disagree with your comment here too.

most or all of the observability domain experts i'm familiar with either stopped talking about "pillars" several years ago, or have been actively speaking against the "3 pillars" framing for several years

most of your takes here sound like they're from somewhere around 2016-2018