This. The statelessness of the OTLP is by design. I did consider stateful designs with e.g. shared state dictionary compression but eventually chose not to, so that the intermediaries can remain stateless.
An extension to OTLP that uses shared state (and columnar encoding) to achieve more compact representation and is suitable for the last network leg in the data delivery path has been proposed and may become a reality in the future: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/pull/171
An extension to OTLP that uses shared state (and columnar encoding) to achieve more compact representation and is suitable for the last network leg in the data delivery path has been proposed and may become a reality in the future: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/pull/171