I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like that it's free. Was planning to one day give https://simpleanalytics.com/ a shot.
GA is complete overkill for hobby websites that get ~100s of visits/day. If you have a commercial website selling stuff, or conduct A/B testing, or have marketing channels funnelling traffic to the site, then you pretty much have to use something like GA or Adobe Analytics.
I'm actually of the exact opposite opinion - for the majority of websites just shoving GA on it and calling it a day is quite sufficient... It's only if your website really lives and dies by making sure users are hitting the important components and converting into paying customers that a more feature-full analytics tool may be valuable.
