I think you're a bit confused by what Google Analytics is. It's not a service API, it's got nothing to do with the back-end. You put a snippet of JS on your page, and then the agency that does your SEO can log in to Google to see a dashboard of site traffic. There's no back-end involvement, and back-end developers never need to know that analytics is occurring at all.
In terms of what happened to get us here? Analytics became a marketing and BI function. Your choice of front-end analytics is going to be made by your CMO, not your CTO. I mean, your CTO can decide whatever he wants for logging & application analytics, but the CMO is also going to want an analytics suite. For a variety of reasons, this favors hosted front-end-centric JS-based solutions rather than logfiles.
The other major thing is that the industry consolidated from 2005-2010. There were like a dozen large vendors, but Omniture bought most of them and then Adobe bought Omniture. By 2015 there are basically two that anyone cares about: Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics, and GA is free which makes it the default. In both cases, they are part of larger "suites" that package other tools, like campaign targeting and A/B testing.
The other things are used without a second thought are Firebase (and Firebase Analytics is now merging with Google Analytics), and Facebook tracking pixels.
In terms of what happened to get us here? Analytics became a marketing and BI function. Your choice of front-end analytics is going to be made by your CMO, not your CTO. I mean, your CTO can decide whatever he wants for logging & application analytics, but the CMO is also going to want an analytics suite. For a variety of reasons, this favors hosted front-end-centric JS-based solutions rather than logfiles.
The other major thing is that the industry consolidated from 2005-2010. There were like a dozen large vendors, but Omniture bought most of them and then Adobe bought Omniture. By 2015 there are basically two that anyone cares about: Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics, and GA is free which makes it the default. In both cases, they are part of larger "suites" that package other tools, like campaign targeting and A/B testing.
The other things are used without a second thought are Firebase (and Firebase Analytics is now merging with Google Analytics), and Facebook tracking pixels.