Looks they do support opentelemetry.

but this is via otel/opentelemetry-collector

The reason is that skywalking is very popular in China because the author is now apache board member. You know China technical community is more like film star circle (just like your Bolleywood). When someone becames the first like first board member of apache, a lot of medias want to report that and you are becoming famous. This is the way how Skywalking getting popular in China

However, I've been a technical veteran for many years. I totally understand that when you become famous, you may lose your original heart especially in China. Apache foundation is now very welcomed in China. But I do understand apache PMC is not so senior and doesn't serve this kind of focus. Moreover, the skywalking project is still in incubating. I usually don't want to trust any technical media in any case. If there is no solid reason that this is good for A, B, C, I'm very cautious about choosing a solution.

The skywalking diagram looks fancy but I don't see many useful matrix from it. It's not like prometheus that everything is under my control. and the document of skywalking is a bit rare.

anyway, I'm still open to choose skywalking but your technical architecture looks more convinced so far. druid+kafka and clickhouse, this is the preferred solution of big data for on-promise environment. I used to have a deep look into many open source big data wheels while I was working for a big data solution company. I fully understand why druid is much better than hadoop impala/hive

Would love if you can give SigNoz a try and let us know what you think