I’d recommend umami. It’s privacy-focused, you don’t need to put up a cookie notice, and it’s got a good free plan. You can always self-host too. Plausible is comparable, but doesn’t have a free plan unless you self-host
matomo has a free self-hosted option. and it doesn't require js injection. if you don't need lots of metrics, it's able to parse some data from nginx/apache logs alone.
Self hosted matomo works well for me. Small site, I just want to have a bit of an idea about what is popular and where visitors come from.
I've had it installed for ages and incremental updates work fine.
I hear that matomo can get resource heavy if your site draws large amounts of visitors. Which makes sense, but it might be something to take into account, and maybe install it on a separate (virtual) machine.
Personally, I self-host Plausible (plausible.io) and I'm really liking it. Slowly replacing google analytics with plausible across all my sites and apps.
GoatCounter works great, has a free hosted plan and is open source (and you can self-host it). You can export all your data, manage privacy settings, manage users and so on. Made in Go.