Any other cookies are not "table stakes".
Random example from more than a decade ago: I worked at an online retailer, and we did a nice redesign of our cart page. Looked great, much more readable, but we started losing sales. Did people hate the redesign? It was certainly easier to use and navigate.
Our marketing guy looked at our analytics and saw that there was a massive drop in checkouts from users whose displays were set to 1024x768. He changed his resolution and, sure enough, the 'Checkout' button was something like four pixels below the bottom of the screen, if you were using Internet Explorer or Chrome and you had your browser maximized.
I get that analytics can seem creepy and gross, and stuff like that is 'none of [retailers'] business' to a lot of people, but without those analytics we would have had no idea why we lost those sales, and would have had to simply revert the redesign with no real opportunity to change it.
I'd expect a bit more from smart people who see very well into what kind of society we are going full speed, with no way out once in (if you don't consider going back to caves as a good option, I don't).
Its very fabric of whole society our kids will live in we are talking about here, nothing less. Is pretty clear what directions the biggest corporations are taking, hey are not even trying to hide what's in plain sight. If we common folks don't at least attempt to stop it or steer it in other direction I am worried nobody else ever will.
I'd have sympathy for these people if they weren't also primarily responsible for the many darkpatterns, traps, and user-hostile aspects of modern interactivity.
That's not really my problem as a (viciously tracked) user. Now, is it?
Everyone thinks that but in practice most folks don't have a clue what they're looking at and just use the numbers as a crutch for whatever opinion they already had.
Of course, this problem isn't just a web analytics one.
Yes, but the cost of doing that through GA is that a single US megacorp outside EU jurisdiction can reconstruct most users entire browsing history for whatever US intelligence wants to do with it.
And at small small cost of privacy violations and spying on users.
If you want analytics, just get consent for be tracked.
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/DN...
Hint: buy the cheapest crappiest laptop you can find. Test your site on it.
You are clearly confusing the issue here.
No one cares for your smartass solution for the problem - it's obvious enough once you are aware of the problem itself. The issue is tracking the problem in the first place.
Hints like "oh you should have just been totally aware of it in the first place" are plain naive.
I'll believe that when they don't have a huge banner that's covering a fourth of the page.
