I don’t think all analytics are evil. There’s a spectrum. Those old number of visitors stamps were fun and harmless. On the other end of the spectrum we have megacorps connecting services and building shadow profiles of people. There’s a lot of room in between.

People that want fun harmless things out of analytics usually use free add-ins that are free because they’re made by megacorps connecting services and building shadow profiles of people.

That's the point I think, you can have some local page counters, broad region geolocation, referal stats etc. without selling your visitors privacy to some corporation, for some data that is not even that useful for you.