OpenTelemetry is being pushed as a replacement for AWS X-Ray SDKs by AWS, but it's in such a broken state for Lambda right now. A 200-500% performance penalty for using it is insane[1][2].
I use X-Ray directly via AWS Powertools for Lambda[1] instead of going through OTel. The underlying AWS X-Ray SDK team pushes OTel pretty hard in their README[2] and Github issues, but the current situation is that OpenTelemetry is just not production ready for serverless applications.
[1]: https://github.com/aws-observability/aws-otel-lambda/issues/...
[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda/issue...