I don't think Datadog did much in terms of specification work, other maintainers were quite active in bringing in the feature creep. AFAICT, it was an assumptio

I don't think Datadog did much in terms of specification work, other maintainers were quite active in bringing in the feature creep. AFAICT, it was an assumption that Google's practices apply to the rest of the world. Anyways complicated protocols benefit the vendors only, since it makes it harder for other vendors (in this case VictoriaMetrics) to come in. Datadog is still popular because their instrumentation libraries, not the protocol which now I suspect is OTel anyways, is much better than most in OTel.