I felt it was necessary to express my derisive laughter
Seemingly
Sure did. Not related to context of this discussion. I was taking about data collection from devices themselves, not the websites they visit.
Practically every non-Chinese Android device has Google Play Services installed, to do all the data collection while providing a bunch of neat libraries for devs. Many things absolutely need it to function, like the Play Store for example, and all other Google apps. Many non-Google apps, especially games, also rely on Play Services, which means you'll never see em on any other store than the Play store. Thankfully it's not as pervasive as it could with third-party apps be thanks to the sheer size of the Chinese market.
Besides, with how much we use the internet, how is tracking your web habits not even worse than tracking what apps you're running? I mean, for myself, my app usage looks something tlike this today: Firefox, Thunderbird, Firefox, Firefox, Firefox, Steam -> Path of Exile, Firefox, Firefox, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.
Hmm, let me check my security plugins... Yeah, Nope! Google Analytics is blocked. You were saying?
Same here (uMatrix is quite excellent). Sadly, not everyone blocks all such scripts, and when it comes to transparency, please, do point me to somewhere on TPU where Google Analytics is explicitly mentioned to be active at all. Or pretty much any mainstream site out there. Also, if you're willing to use a blocker in your browser, why are you not willing to use a blocker/remover for Windows?
Keep in mind as well, by blocking "unnecessary" parts of the website, we're also denying TPU and other sites from ad-based income (and you can be damn sure that the ads have as much tracking as can be stuffed in em), which makes us utter dicks to the site owner. Food for thought.
You're just grasping at straws at this point.
Block ajax.google.com on gsmarena.com and tell me how well it goes for you (hint: it breaks the loading of high-res pictures in the image viewer). Other sites get even more broken, like humblebundle (no pictures at all) when you block apis.google.com.
These are just 2 examples I got by scrolling through my currently open tabs. I've seen sites that demand ajax.google.com, apis.google.com, gstatic.com, and
www.google.com all at the same time, which is downright impressive at showing how crappily they're coded, but this is how the web is these days, sadly.
It would seem clear that you don't know how to do it.
I do it, until I get forced to allow Google through (yay smaller sites without their own CDN). As a paid GSuite user, I don't mind the Google spying all that much because I trust (current) Google to keep my data safe and private enough (I trust current MS too, for the record).
You said something about delusion, irony much?
Maybe delusion was a tad strong. Definitely less-informed though, I reckon.
EDIT: Also, if you know where Google has published the source code for anything that isn't orchestration tooling or core support libraries, please, do share. I could really use a self-hosted GMail...