I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1].
Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off.
And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting personal info. Profiling visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable data on visits.
Note that if you want to self-host Matomo, you don't need more than a VPS with 1 GB of RAM (even less but let's assume significant traffic) so it's cheap to self host too.
And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.
And if you write that blog with a purpose (e.g. promoting yourself or your projects) then you need to get a sense of how well your articles are received. You can't do marketing without a feedback loop.
[1] https://matomo.org/
[2] https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/
[3] https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/