As someone who has been in this space a long time I think you are pretty off base here. The commercial vendors have absolutely been the ones who did all the innovations in tracing. The OSS equivalents were really poor imitations for the longest time. Zipkin/Jaeger/Opentrace have been coming along slowly for many years, but it's really been maybe 2 years since that work has really become competitive with what was available in the commercial APM space. For the most part it's felt like that only happened because the commercial tools have all halted new work on their proprietary tools and told their staff to push Otel over the finish line. None of them actually want to pay teams of engineers to maintain proprietary libraries for every language, the execs are absolutely drooling to find a way to pawn as much of that cost off onto others via Otel. Locking people in on agents is naive when the truly heavy lift in migrating platforms is the swapping dashboards and alerts and retraining all your staff.

You see the same thing around integrations, everyone used to have to roll their own proprietary chunks of code that in the end were all querying mostly the same data points back from servers and API's. Now everyone just prefers to wait for the Prometheus exporter and they adopt that instead.