If you're storing personal data, you need consent. A banner would be the least intrusive way to do that. (If your backend analytics don't store a cookie and don't store IPs, you may not be storing personal data to begin with.)
You only need consent if there is absolutely no reason for you to have that data. Consent is the emergency hatch, only to be used in exceptional circumstances.
"But what gives?!", I hear you think. As a law professor said (roughly): it was truly amazing to see how an entire industry colluded so swiftly and completely to undermine legislation.
> You only need consent if there is absolutely no reason for you to have that data.
Also no.
There are specific acceptable reasons to have the data. LI is a weak one and does not apply in many situations (there are a lot of balancing factors applied, including a "reasonable person" standard on the data subject). As you say, consent is a very strong one, if received it can virtually always apply. The ones in-between only apply in limited situations genuinely necessary for business (company management of employee data, addresses of customers you need to ship to) or to a small set of companies (hospital management of health data, AML/KYC for banks), and rarely to general web / app analytics.
"I would like that data to serve ads better" (or "to sell to someone who wants to serve ads better") is not "absolutely no reason", but it is also rarely one of the other reasons. And conversely, even if in some case if you have a legitimate business interest i.e. would go bankrupt without it, it is not LI in the sense of GDPR if it cannot meet other factors. The modern adtech ecosystem more or less requires "consent-strength" allowances.
In the context of backend analytics, it is difficult-to-impossible for any of those others to apply. The point is that FE vs. BE, cookie vs. no cookie isn’t really what matters. What data you collect and why is what matters.
