Just updating on my experience: After exploring Matomo and Google Analytics, ease of implementation definitely went to GA, given that Discourse admin has in-built support for it. Rich reporting features won me over as well, though privacy concerns still persist.
Decided to go for GA for now and revisit Matomo or Plausible (thanks @neil) further down the road. Thank you for voting/contributing!
You should think about it first, because once you use it, you can no longer remove the data collected by Google even if you change to Matomo(or different privacy-focused solutions). In my opinion, Discourse’s built-in stats are already more than enough