[BarryMilo]

This is pretty interesting to me, as I do use Grafana in my current role. But none of their other products, and not their helm chart (we're on the Bitnami chart if that's a thing).

So far it's pretty good. We're at least one major version behind, but hey everything still works.

I cannot imagine other products support as many data sources (though I'm starting to think they all suck, I just dump what I can in InfluxDB).

[pahae]

I agree. I think OP has made the mistake of using more than just Grafana for dashboards and perhaps user queries.

I operate a fairly large custom VictoriaMetrics-based Observability platform and have learned early on to only use Grafana as opposed to other Grafana products. Part of the stack used to use Mimir's frontend as caching layer but even that died with Mimir v3.0, now that it can't talk to generic Prometheus APIs anymore (vanilla Prom, VictoriaMetrics, promxy etc.). I went back to Cortex for caching.

Such a custom stack is obviously not for everyone and takes much more time, knowledge and effort to deploy than some helm chart but overall I'd say it did save me some headache. At least when compared to the Google-like deprecation culture Grafana seems to have.