The author is 100% correct: Monitoring should be the most boring tool in the stack. Its one and only job is to be more reliable than the thing it's monitoring.

The moment your monitoring stack requires a complex dependency like Kafka, or changes its entire agent flow every 18 months, it has failed its primary purpose. It has become the problem.

This sounds less like a technical evolution and more like the classic VC-funded push to get everyone onto a high-margin cloud product, even at the cost of the open-source soul.