What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?

Has anyone used OpenTelemetry for long-running batch jobs? OTel seems designed for web apps where spans last seconds/minutes, but batch jobs run for hours or days. Since spans are only submitted after completion, there's no way to track progress during execution, making OTel nearly unusable for batch workloads.

I have a similar issue with Prometheus -- not great for batch job metrics either. It's frustrating how many otherwise excellent OSS tools are optimized for web applications but fall short for batch processing use cases.