Logging is kinda a mess in general for contextualization. Most that support it use kV tupled appended to the log line itself. OpenTelemetry is probably the best hope of supporting a world with contextual logs, metrics, traces which imho is a good thing. OTEL logging does some opinionated things with message construction though, so caveat emptor.

Otel logs aim to record the execution context in the logs.

In languages when the context is implicitly passed (e.g. via thread-local storage / MDC in Java) Otel automatically injects trace id and span id in the logs emitted using your regular logging library (e.g. log4j). Then in your log backend you can make queries like "show me all log records of all services in my distributed system that were part of this particular user request".

Disclosure: I am an Otel contributor, working on logs (work-in-progress, not for production use yet).

From my experience, traces are not need for every one. AFAIK opentelemetry "standard" (sdk) changes very often, especially painful because of the constant critical changes in the library, a big size of compiled executable binary on the otuput...

opentelemetry + Jaeger all-in-one binary is probably easiest way to start experimenting. Results are pretty useful but it is more work than simple logging