This is a nice step in the discussion, I guess, but it really gets sidetracked from the fundamental issue with AMP. The fundamental issue is not 'nobody needs this' or 'this is a non-problem' or 'AMP isn't good'. The issue is that AMP is a monopolist, technologically inferior solution to an important problem, and monopoly power is being used to force the entire web ecosystem into an inferior solution.

We could have a better solution to this problem with reduced (I am not naive enough to think Google would be fully altruistic here) lock-in and better engineering, and Google is definitely capable of delivering that solution. Even with internal (past Googler) perspective here I honestly can't come up with an explanation [1] for why AMP is so bad from an engineering and feature set perspective. It's built with a good understanding of the problems users face, and they've adapted somewhat well to the needs of publishers, but the design is a trainwreck from the perspective of a frontend webdev, browser engineer, or someone delivering content that isn't just news articles.

It's quite right and reasonable to start with something and move forward to a more ideal, standardized solution, but it seems very difficult to evolve AMP's design towards anything that really meets the needs of the web platform in the long term. It's basically a walled garden through and through - just a garden that happens to have some really nice flowers, maintained by world-class gardeners.

[1] There is an extremely cynical explanation here that applies to many low-quality Google product launches - shipping something ASAP to qualify for a promotion. But the AMP team has demonstrated real commitment so even if that was what originally set things in motion, it doesn't explain what's going on here.

Google will promote an AMP page over another page that has jumped through similar hoops to remain fast (but is not technically an AMP page). Google isn't in the business of promoting fast pages, they promote AMP. This is the problem with AMP.

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