Having dealt with lots of customers who take the stats generated by GA as gospel despite multiple problems, I disagree.

Some example problems: referrals unreliable, countries unreliable, sampling distorting figures, no warnings when data displayed is based on very little data, sessions often misinterpreted as clicks by users, inexplicable disparities with other methods of tracking because their methods are pretty opaque and because of sampling, in-page analytics looking deceptively like click-tracking when in most cases it uses page load data. Some of that you can attribute to user error, but it is not good for the market that google dominates tracking like this, and GA is sometimes misleading.

Just as an example of a problem I ran into recently - the free GA doesn't offer referral stats for https websites, but this isn't made clear to end users. As a result they simply trust that referrals have collapsed if a referring site switches to https.

I don't think OP is saying GA sucks; I think he's saying that you can't take the results that GA gives you as being to-the-numbers accurate. They're still directionally accurate, and GA is so easy to implement that it gives you a lot of bang for relatively little effort.

Many people actually don't realize that GA does sampling, or the effect said sampling can have on their numbers.

I agree with your summary but don't agree that it's click bait. I read it as the author's warning that you should RTFM when deploying GA, which I doubt most people do.

In a perfect world where everyone understands every single data point completely or you don't have to work with everyone else that's completely true. That kind of thinking is however extremely limiting to 9/10 organisations out there because team work and team buy-in is so important for how decisions are made. Believing that GA can do anything and everything, which is the belief of more managers than you'd like to think, is exactly the underlying issue.

- Simon