It's been some time since I had a hand in that code. We were trying to solve a couple problems. First, third party event trackers all introduced a delay to ensure they captured events, at the time of writing. Second, none of the major vendors at the time allowed a full data export.

We wrote lil' brother to solve those problems, but also to gather enough context on non-instrumented browser events to e.g. draw heat maps without a ton of extra work on the collection side.

Fun bonus fact. Lil' brother's tracking image response was implemented as the smallest rendering of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" single cover that fit inside of a TCP packet: https://github.com/shutterstock/lil-brother/blob/master/data...

Takes me back :-)