Even greater their incentive to keep playing the game. Many more wages depend on that than my own. I am not necessarily calling for them being wrong, but for them playing with the numbers and presenting them in a way, that makes many people believe. They have credible deniability as well, because their tracking script didn't even run on browsers, which blocked it, so they couldn't know about those "edge cases". Only that those "edge cases" can make a significant portion of the total visitors of that website.
In the end they profit from telling everyone, that they must use GA (or similar tool) to track what is going on on the website and most marketing people will happily jump on that train, because it gives them any kind of data, which they can use to justify things, even if that data is only half the story and cannot be relied upon to give a true picture. "The data tells us so!" makes the job much easier, unfortunately often at the cost of user privacy. And so the make believe, that you must track your users with third party trackers continues and propagates. Then on the development side of things, developers or their higher ups eschew the work needed to implement first party tracking. They want that cake at no cost. Without strong ehics, the website of such an organization is doomed to disrespect the privacy of its visitors.
In the end they profit from telling everyone, that they must use GA (or similar tool) to track what is going on on the website and most marketing people will happily jump on that train, because it gives them any kind of data, which they can use to justify things, even if that data is only half the story and cannot be relied upon to give a true picture. "The data tells us so!" makes the job much easier, unfortunately often at the cost of user privacy. And so the make believe, that you must track your users with third party trackers continues and propagates. Then on the development side of things, developers or their higher ups eschew the work needed to implement first party tracking. They want that cake at no cost. Without strong ehics, the website of such an organization is doomed to disrespect the privacy of its visitors.