It's not a choice between strace or nothing. It's a choice between strace, ftrace, perf, or eBPF -- and that's just the Linux builtins. Many low overhead addons can also do syscall tracing (sysdig, LTTng).

I often run ftrace, perf, and eBPF on our production instances for syscall tracing. If I ran strace, the instance would suddenly be very slow, and it would trigger Hysterix (and other) timeouts and be removed from the ASG and auto terminated. Our environment is fault-tolerant, so yes, we can run strace -- you just don't get much output, and the load vanishes from the instance you are looking at.