It's not that bad. I have it blocked, and it only affects a few sites. For those sites, there are alternatives.

Is that so? I've had GA blocked with HTTP Switchboard since I installed it, and never come across a site which required me allowing it. Some sites need me to turn off Chameleon so that they recognise Flash or something, but GA's never been problematic.

And for years NoScript has provided a surrogate script that makes those sites think GA isn't being blocked.

Really?

I've had the GA domains redirected to 0.0.0.0 via HOSTS file for... ever since GA started to exist, and I haven't seen any specific messages to that effect. It'd make sense that some would use JS to detect this, but I have that disabled by default.

Maybe it's because I see a lot of other "broken" sites in my daily browsing due to that, and I don't really need to find out why - if a site isn't giving the info I need, I go back to the search results and to the next one.

It may only break those using advanced features, like A-B variations, but not for regular tracking.