Exactly, other than very minimal metrics you can't do much of anything without cookies. It's great that there are now many alternative analytics services available, but I feel like they all just do the exact same thing – stick a two-line script on your website, then get some very minimal data about your website. This is probably good enough for most people, but it becomes very hard to actually do anything with this data if you're running a more "serious" project.

But I'm always amazed at how much popularity these projects seem to gather. I myself made a very simple landing page [1] for a similar service (but one that caters more to the saas based applications), and it's managed to gather some interest even though I've barely done any promotion to it.

[1]: https://tinylens.io