That may be because it's somehow expected that your service will run as a systemd unit and its logging output will be managed by journald, or run alone in a virtual machine where it'll send its log to another server like grafana, opentelemetry, or others.
Not saying it's a good status quo. But that may be the unspoken unwritten assumption.
You may find that tracing-appender meets your needs. There is also log4rs, but that operates on log events, not tracing spans, but I think there are ways you can forward them.
I agree that configuring the logging/tracing subscribers properly feels more complicated then it should be. Here's a rolling file example with tracing-appender and log4rs. tracing-appender doesn't have compression of the rolling files. Also note there are some known formatting bugs