Yeah, or if people returned to using HTML the way it was meant to be used instead of using a JavaScript framework on every page.

One of them is a functional change and one of them isn't. And they are not incompatible changes, so you can do both if you really care.

But there's no reason to ignore literally free improvements just because there's bigger, not free improvements to be had as well.

A single analytics loading script and the tracking payload is larger than the gains from the removal of these tags. Most pages have more than one script and payload too.

This reminds me of a job I recently did for a company that had duplicate Google Analytics tags. I removed one thinking I was helping only to be yelled at when their numbers were cut in half the following month.

After I explained that they were getting incorrect information I was told "I know this isn't exactly ethical ..." yada yada. I fired that client.

Firefox has a tracker blocking mode that shows you all of the trackers. I counted 25 different tracker services being blocked on a single news article yesterday.

Below is the recommended Google Analytics loader

    <!-- Google Analytics -->
    <script>
    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;    i[r]=i[r]||function(){
    (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new     Date();a=s.createElement(o),
    m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;        m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
    
    ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto');
    ga('send', 'pageview');
    </script>
    <!-- End Google Analytics -->

That's 455 bytes, even if you have an adblocker and don't load the external javascript. No amount of removing html, head, and body tags will overcome this.