No website needs GA. You choose to have it for whatever reason but there's not ever a need to use GA. There are many less intrusive ways to father statistics than to sell your users to Google.
* It helps me focus on the content my users need the most, and see what triggers donations.
* It helps me catch and diagnose traffic dips, and react to them.
* It helps me catch and diagnose unexpected issues. For instance, caching changes broke a component that accounts for 30% of my revenue. It would have stayed broken for a whole month if I didn't see the dip in events.
I will replace Google Analytics soon, but even as a tech-savvy person, it's a dreadful task. Google Analytics is free, simple, and incredibly reliable. Setting up your own self-hosted alternative, or paying a monthly fee for an alternative is a lot less desirable.
There are alternatives but as you say sadly none are as easy - probably because none have as much budget behind them. I see a number of comparison articles for gdpr compliant analytics, so it seems to have become its own market of sorts.
I have opted myself out of most Google services due to the intrusive nature, I wouldn't want to impose it on my site visitors (but I also have no need to monetize, so maybe a different ballpark).
Just knowing what I need to do requires me to wear my lawyer hat. Actually doing it requires me to wear my developer hat, or to pay other people a monthly fee.
I do this because I swore to do the right thing [1], and because I have a lot of time on my hands. I can't reasonably expect amateur bloggers to do the same. It's an unreasonable burden.