> The EU is absolutely obsessed with writing up laws to invade into absolutely every area of our lives.

That is a funny way to frame it! Being European I, for one, welcome a government trying to protect me from the massive, for-profit, privacy invasion and user data trafficking that the internet business currently is.

And, as said before, the "cookie law" applies to any form of user tracking and storing or exchanging user-specific data. You can't code around it. Sending visitor data to Google Analytics server-side could technically hide the cookie, but it would legally be exactly the same as using the cookie based client-side javascript.