Any advice on using Google Analytics to track data on categories of content?

I’m running a site at https://www.schoolnewsnetwork.org that has about 90 different categories of content.

The articles (posts) that are created always have at least one category and sometimes multiple categories assigned to the post.

Google Analytics tracks data on individual pages and posts well, but we would like to track data for all the pages in a category of content.

Using the following post as an example, it is categorized as “Grandville”. We can see how many pageviews the post gets.
https://www.schoolnewsnetwork.org/2023/02/01/student-organized-college-qa-panel-earns-high-marks/

We can also see how many pageviews the category of Grandville receives.
https://www.schoolnewsnetwork.org/category/grandville/

But, the only way we can see how many pageviews ALL the posts in the category of Grandville gets over a period of time is to manually find the posts in Google Analytics and add them up.

I have three ideas. Can you review them and give me your thoughts? Perhaps you know of a better method.

1. Change the permalink structure to make it easier to filter in Google Analytics. I would include %category% in the URL structure and set up some rules to redirect content to the new URLs. Our current structure is https://www.schoolnewsnetwork.org/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ . The new structure could be https://www.schoolnewsnetwork.org/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/%category%

I worry that this might cause some server issues.

2. Adjust the SEO Page Title to include the primary category. Right now the title shows “post tile | site title”. I could add “primary category” to the title. I could then manually sort these in Google Analytics. Seems like a very low-risk way to go.

3. Add a Custom Variable using Google Tags. Not exactly sure how to set this up, but it might be the best solution.

Any other thoughts on how this might be accomplished?

If it matters, we are currently using the UA version of GA, but will be adding G4 very soon.