...Can you not track how many people visit your site on the back end?
If you do it right, a high proportion of your site visits leave no trace in your logs that they were ever there.
But Google Analytics is a 30 second setup, whereas setting up a log analyzer (or even getting logging going in the first place) is a much bigger hassle. Some of my stuff is on wacky Cloud Function hosting that I wouldn't have the first idea of how to go about logging.
Thus, nearly 100% of us just use Analytics. If they had an "evil" checkbox that I could uncheck to stop it doing whatever you're worried it will do, then I'd happily do so.
Frankly, I'm not sure what GA could do that would bother anybody. All it does is tell me how many people saw what page and how long they stayed there. It certainly can't tell me anything about you personally.
I don't have time to screw around with figuring out what uses third-party cookies, what uses browser fingerprinting, what correlates information across sites, and/or what tracks what how in general, nor to check all the time to see if any of that has changed. I'm just gonna block all of it, because it's not worth the investment of my time to make such distinctions. The most I could get out of it would be slower page loads.
Actually, I'm not even bothering to make THAT decision. My ad blocker blocks GA by default, and I'm not going to worry my pretty little head about unblocking anything unless something breaks.
It puts tracking cookies on your visitors which means you need a cookie banner.
And of course it invades the privacy of your users and slows down your site.