[phillipcarter]

You can sorta have your cake and eat to too.

Firstly, not all spans are interesting. When 99.99% of your traffic is just going to serve up an HTTP 200 within your acceptable latency threshold, you don't need every one of those. You probably do want to keep 100% of error spans, or those where the root has a duration beyond a configured threshold. There's tools to be able to sample that way.

Secondly, there's ways to also attach your effective sample rate as metadata to spans, and if there's a backend that supports re-weighting counts based on that, you can still get accurate all-up counts of overall traffic.

Admittedly, OTel and many other backends don't have the best story for this yet. But it's getting better.