I can say that going from a place that had all of that observability tooling set up to one that was at the "ssh'ing into a box and greping a log" stage, you best believe I missed company A immensely. Even knowing which box to ssh into, which log file to grep, and which magic words to search far was nigh impossible if you weren't the dev that set up the machine and wrote the bug in the first place.

I completely agree with you but I also think, like many aspects of "tech" certain segments of it have been monopolised and turned into profit generators for certain organisations. DevOps, Agile/Scrum, Observability, Kubernetes, are all examples of this.

This dilutes the good and helpful stuff with marketing bullshit.

Grafana seemingly inventing new time series databases and engines every few months is absolutely painful to try keep up to date with in order to make informed decisions.

So much so I've started using rrdtool/smokeping again.

You might look into https://openobserve.ai/ - you can self host it and it's a single binary that ingests logs/metrics/traces. I've found it useful for my side projects.