The one you talk about does it for the joy of writing or showcasing their projects.

But there is another where writing is a part of it, but getting views and feeling heard is another part, where numbers going up on a dashboard gives them dopamine.

They need analytics as that's the way they verify that someone is actually paying attention. Without it, they would never know if someone is reading it or not, and that's a part of their motivation.

Yet another group just want to know which of their post is more popular than another, they maybe don't really care about the specific numbers but more the ratio between posts, so they can keep writing what people seem to be reading the most.

Regardless, none of that actually need intrusive client-side analytics and tracking, it all can be done server-side but seems we've collectively forgotten how to do this.

Hear, hear. Heaven forbid someone in need of some dopamine greps their server logs, or increments some counter in a db...