The referer header behavior changed for https 7+ years ago. As I recall, it can be crippled by the source site (e.g. inbound google traffic).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21922143/why-isnt-the-th...

Why this is good for anyone other than Google Analytics is beyond my current understanding.

It’s a privacy measure so that third party sites can’t see which page a user is coming from. It’s not necessarily anyone’s business to know the previous URL in a user’s browser history.

> Why this is good for anyone other than Google Analytics is beyond my current understanding.

Better privacy. There have long been extensions to strip out or fake referrer information from requests.