[fsenart]

We may converge. Though, let's don't end up in an ideological battle. Thank you for the ride so far.

It's not about accuracy. In the original question, I've depicted a simple ladder of identity, and we both agree that the most accurate counter would be the counter of logged-in users. Anything after is by definition less accurate. In addition, the argument about adblockers is a matter of popularity and time, take, for example, the many contribs to open blocklist projects trying to blacklist the most popular privacy-focused tools. How ironic! Finally, I won't go into the GA bashing game at least out of respect for those who work on and with it, every day; an because it's out of scope here.

So what can we compare? How can we conclude? Let's focus on the very constituent of a unique/returning user metric.

It's all about semantics. We must first agree on semantic and then compare tools. And we both know what is the semantic of a unique/returning user and what cannot be.

Clearly, there is no privacy-focused tool, to the extent of my knowledge, that can or do provide a unique/returning users metric. Though, the problem is that all of them advertise the opposite, sometimes event viciously.

Any other discussion going beyond the semantic feels like I wanted orange juice; still, you provided me with a blend containing no orange while trying to either convince me that orange isn't that good or misleading me by advertising loudly that the blend contains orange.