The statistics provide insights for media creators / owners how much their media is viewed / listened to. This is required for some publishers.
If we go the route of a static site generator it will be much easier to enable a deployment where the statistics are not used and not send to a publishers.
This in turn is bad for federation. With federation we must be able to have hot-linking and introspection on usage.
The alternative is that federation requires a server side component which I think is better. That way statistics can be assured.