The current behavior is useful when you only instrument certain routes/operations and don't care about dangling/orphan redis calls. It is hard to achieve it otherwise.

Can we make this configurable? AFAIR some instrumentations provide an option like WithCreateRootSpans that achieves what you suggst.

Users can use their sampler to allow/disallow orphan spans. For instance, they can use ParentBased(root=AlwaysOff) to prevent creating dangling/orphan spans, though it is a global-like config of otel, which affects all libs (not just redis-go)

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/a03382ada8afa9415266a84dafac0510ec8c160f/specification/trace/sdk.md#parentbased

So, I am not sure WithCreateRootSpans is necessary. And, having this following code would bypass users' sampler even if they want to use always-on sampling.

BTW, using the IsRecording method may drop non-orphan spans, as the parent span might be ended (means not recording) before creating a child span, but that does not make the child span an orphan. We should use IsValid to decide if it is a valid parent span and use IsSampled to know if it is kept.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/a03382ada8afa9415266a84dafac0510ec8c160f/specification/trace/api.md#isrecording

After a Span is ended, it SHOULD become non-recording and IsRecording SHOULD always return false.

My suggestion is to remove this kind of code, and mention the ParentBased(root=AlwaysOff) sampler as an alternative on the changelog. So users know how to keep this behavior if they want to.

I was not aware about root=AlwaysOff 👍

Then yes, let's document it and remove the code you've mentioned.