You positively need to know what your users come to click on, where they bail, what features they never use, what browsers constantly drop out at this specific part of your website, what IP uses the bot that scrapes your most costly site wide search every millisecond etc.

Sure, any of these data could be derive from more focused, pinpoint check if you knew in advance what exactly you need to know. But let's be realistic, there's no way to anticipate every single use case and only collect the minimum data needed to fulfill it.

I don't see detailed usage data collection as a critical issue as long as it isn't sold/leaked/stored for decades/misused to harm. We can come up with so many cases where it has been effectively misused, but I'd argue it's like saying kitchen knives are misused again and again to kill people and we should stop their use. It's not realistic.