Disabling Analytics and AdSense is very easy - just enable DNT on your browser. We haven't found any acceptable alternatives, although building our own analytics software[1] is on the roadmap.
There are other reasons, but PHP is a pretty big one. If we're going to use anything other than Google Analytics, we want to integrate it pretty deeply with our frontend. We were thinking of making a Flask extension that would capture all non-personal information without having to serve analytics code to the client. Also, as far as I know, Piwik does not support DNT.
[1] https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush/issues/118