Most projects don't need telemetry. They need better logs.
On the backend... Why wouldn't you log every request that hits your server, and why wouldn't you already know what those requests mean? Why would you let your frontend make direct requests to any other server when you can just proxy it yourself and maintain control?
On the frontend... What's so hard about wrapping all your event listeners and periodically sending those logs back to your server?
That's not even scratching the surface, but even something this simple and easy to implement is already miles ahead of most free-tier telemetry offerings, and you retain full control.
If you don't have a backend, then it's all telemetry, right? And backend logs don't capture a lot of the UX side of things - how a call got triggered, from where, etc (which yeah you can start to instrument, but then that's telemetry).