I've thought about doing this as well, but I like being able to use dumb tools to get an idea of what's going on. There's a lot that has to be working correctly to use traces. Or maybe I'm just scared of the tooling because I don't have enough experience with it yet idk
You can also just, Log the spans as they are being created to stderr/stdout -- I've done this on a previous project with this approach of "spans first".
It made it debuggable via output if needed, but the primary consumption became span oriented.
