It's a good thing that Google don't give preferential treatment to their own products.
It's a bad thing that Google's own analytics product isn't good enough to still get 4x100 in Google's own perf tool. It means that people will give up and accept lower scores because it's "impossible" to be perfect. That harms everyone who uses the web.
There is a common fear (and I have to admit I irrationally feel this fear) that your ranking will be impacted negatively by not using Google Analytics. Maybe not intentionally, but perhaps because Google knows less about your site.
I know there's a case for these additional stats being less than useful, but SimpleAnalytics doesn't appear to provide the same statistics that GA does. It's a pretty big hurdle for some people to give up on funnels, time on page, bounce rates etc.
If there's an analytics platform with a closer feature match to GA, but with good page speed scores, that might be more convincing to them.
Maybe small business owners doing this themselves will give up because they don't know about these other analytics services. But I agree I don't think a marketer would give up and settle for a lower score, but I definitely can see a marketer being frustrated with the lack of feedback in order to get a perfect score.
It's very unlikely that swapping Google Analytics for an alternative will be an acceptable solution to a performance issue. Clients like GA. It's "industry standard", it plays well with other marketing tools, and people know it. Performance is understood to be important but not at the expense of understanding what users are doing. Website owners will readily drop a bit of perf in order to keep GA.
You can get very detailed and interesting statistics directly from your access.log. Zero JS, zero third party tracking, zero performance decrease.
I do this more than google analytics today, on one side because i want to respect my users on the other side because i too block google analytics (as many) and i want my data to reflect something somewhat close to reality.
It's a bad thing that Google's own analytics product isn't good enough to still get 4x100 in Google's own perf tool. It means that people will give up and accept lower scores because it's "impossible" to be perfect. That harms everyone who uses the web.