* Faster iteration time for developers: the more often you release updates the faster you can move. If your script has a one week cache lifetime then there's not much point in daily releases and any experiments you run will be really skewed.
* Quicker response to problems: if we push out a bad update that gets past our testing, the TTL we serve it with determines how long that will stick around in browser caches.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, on ads JS, and I previously worked on mod_pagespeed. Not speaking for Google, just myself.)
https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js
Google cannot bust this in case of a bug. They can mitigate this by having a loader with built in functionality that always looks out for "is there a newer version" but that has its limitations.
I'm no lawyer, but I read that as it is not used for tracking users.
(full disclosure: I work at Google, on something unrelated)
> We only [sic] see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser. Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure.
I read that as what's written there. It's for tracking. Tracking popularity is still tracking.
Tracking usually refers to tracking users, which as I read the FAQ isn't what it's for.
Probably to allow for updates and estimate popularity, with low overhead assuming CSS files are small.
The script request is to a cookiless domain for performance, unlike the ad request, so there's not even much useful information on that request.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, on ads JS, and I previously worked on mod_pagespeed. Not speaking for Google, just myself.)
"Error: 500 from Lighthouse API: Internal Server Error"
Fixating on the overall score seems like an indication of a different problem.
For example, you can't change the caching behavior of google-analytics.js, and it's usually intractable to split apart your CSS to optimize for above-the-fold content. Oh well, you didn't get a perfect score. Stay practical.
I'd be hard pressed to let stupid things client/managers can do direct how this sort of tool should work. For example, it'd be silly to demand "score inflation" just because your client is unreasonable. Or rather, if a client is making your life hard, I don't think it's the world that needs to change.
What's your solution if your client measures your success by punching their website into https://www.worthofweb.com/calculator/? And doesn't take you seriously enough to listen to you in general?
I also find it strange how I can get an A on every other page speed service, including GTMetrix, but get an F on Google's tes(s). Totally useless.