GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.
I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries.
And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)
For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.
Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats?
Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.