alt Hacker NewsSure, but OTEL has all of the right qualities for the majority of use cases here.
Standards based, many off-the-shelf providers, out-of-process + buffered by default, many standard processors for traces + spans, many tools for storing and querying.
OTEL is pretty widely supported and mostly "just works" at this stage of maturity. A failing/mis-configured OTEL endpoint/collector isn't going to stop you from getting work done in the same way that a failing proxy is. You'll drop some traces, but that's probably OK in most cases.
There is a place for proxies, but those places should share the same failure boundary mode. Meaning if the proxy fails, it should necessarily stop forward agent activity. Example: proxy injection of secrets instead of local acquisition.
IMO, a key place for proxies is resource access where the client is not fully trusted (or for any reason it may fail to log correctly).
AI agents seem like a pretty clear case of this. Both because of recent issues, and that they tend to run on end user devices where strict compliance is harder to maintain.