Hi,
Some Matomo files should not be public to everyone on the internet. Because of this Matomo generates .htaccess files so your webserver denies access. You can check if the files are protected by accessing the URLs in the browser.
If the protection doesn’t work, then you might have set up Apache to not respect .htaccess files. I don’t know Apache at all, but I think the solution has to do with AllowOverride All (Required Private Directories - #12 by kdmail001).
Have you checked if the cronjob actually runs successfully. Maybe run the command once and look at the output (or check the file where you redirect the output to /home/example/matomo-archive.log)
Once you have fixed the above and the cronjob generates the reports correctly, you can disable browser-archiving so that Matomo doesn’t generate reports when you access them, but only displays the ones generated by the last cronjob run.
This can speed up Matomo by a lot
I assume you used Matomo before Matomo 4 and upgraded later.
In Matomo 3, the database tables were stored in MySQL using what MySQL calls utf8, but is in practice a broken subset of UTF-8 that e.g. doesn’t allow storing emoji. So in Matomo 4, now utf8mb is used, which works correctly.
But the conversion can take a long time for huge databases, so it is something you need to start manually. You can look at https://matomo.org/faq/how-to-update/how-to-convert-the-database-to-utf8mb4-charset/ for more information about this.