Or too dumb to just not use tracking cookies in the first place?

I honestly feel like comments like this come from people who have never run a marketing team. Analytics cookies are very useful.

Because server side tracking isn't sufficient? I've heard from numerous people that it definitely is. Tracking cookies are a massive privacy invasion for what is minimal, if any, benefit

Even if your site is set up well to support it there is objectively less data you get back. Like it's hard to figure out where are the trigger points that increase or decrease conversion all that stuff. Or if people leave and come back. And it's a lot harder to run your own analytics (coming from somebody who does) even if you are just hosting somebody else's solution.

At that point what are you actually optimizing? If someone wanted to visit your site they would

Too dumb to understand why so many websites use these :)

Setting up all the random shit gdpr requires (downloading and deleting data, protection officer blah blah blah) takes a lot more than a cookie bar. It's expensive and if the site doesn't make much money from europe, why the hell would it waste money on doing that?