I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually choose GA, but in a different fashion, because I do care about its bloat. I simply write a short JavaScript using Measurement Protocol[1] to only send pageview to GA, which works very well for me.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...