An example of OpenTelemetry demonstrating that you can set the MeterProvider with otel.SetMeterProvider after calling otel.Meter and get the metrics emitted as needed by the new settings. The same is true (but not shown here) for otel.Tracer and TracerProvider.

One limit (also demonstrated here if you squint at the output) is that any changes to metric values (see the counter.Add(..., 100) call before the SetProvider that never makes it out) made before setting MeterProvider will be dropped. Values changed after calling SetMeterProvider will be emitted as expected.