It's not really about an ego boost, and in any case, egos can take a pretty major bruising during the very anxious weeks.
Actually Google killed that report earlier this year. It's kind of a big deal, a lot of companies were using ISP dimension to distinguish external vs employee traffic.
No, and trying to make your content more appealing based on analytics is often a great way to tend towards SEO optimized blogspam.
0 value for my personal websites. All the value for Google.
No JS, no tracking, just basic analytics. Even if it's only a personal blog, knowing what people care about is helpful
If anyone has recommendations for something self-hosted like this, I'm in the market :)
Analytics are for optimizing your business and presentation, for finding out how big your audience is, how it responds to new content or features, etc. And for users it's not a loss of privacy if the data is anonymized.
Even for your personal blog, if you treat it as a tool for reaching an audience, then analytics are useful for growing that audience. When you put effort into writing articles, you want to see some results, after all it's an investment. And even if it's a hobby, seeing the size of your audience can serve as motivation. Even if it's a hobby, as long as you publish it online, you want others to read it, so it isn't a hobby that you can do in isolation without feedback.
In fact analytics can be a legitimate interest under GDPR. Usage of Google Analytics might be in a gray area due to it being a third-party and it's debatable if they are GDPR compliant, but usage of analytics in general is perfectly legit without explicit consent, as long as the data is anonymized.