Today there are alternatives to get analytics without upgrading to the Confluence Premium plan.
For example, the Better Content Archiving app collects analytics:
My team develops this app and our focus is more than just analytics. We use it as an input to better determine the status of a page or blog post. For example, we can classify a page "expired" if it has not been edited for N days, it has an expiration date set and that passed or if is labelled with "outdated".
So, analytics is just a mechanism, but it is available for any Confluence plan and it comes free for less than 10 users.