Nope, you don't need analytics. You might want analytics, and you might want them enough to bother every single visitor with a popup so you can have them, but you don't need them.

And if you decide you need them, you can do them server side. That's not as good? Oh well. See above about want vs need.

Why not just make a Google law? Because Google is far from the only abuser. Using a VPN that routes through Europe is a real eye-opener. At least whatever country I got routed through apparently required that cookie banners include a list of every single partner who got your data. Pretty much every site had hundreds of them. One was literally over a thousand. No, the entire industry is rotten. And the epidemic of cookie banners just shows how rotten it is. They can't even be shamed into behaving.