Not saying that's true, but if it is, wouldn't that mean AMP is not a desired product?
I fully support a "faster page spec" that search engines incentivize, just like I support a ranking boost for using HTTPS.
But AMP isn't that; AMP is incentivizing the payment of tribute data to Google under the veneer of a faster page spec, to steer the rhetoric more favorably for the company.
It's desired by the (non-paying) users, but not necessarily by web publishers. Here the desires of said users and Google align: they both want to see a search result quickly.
How much of this is actual desire by web publishers, and how much is just collective stupidity. Do they really want their websites to be a hassle to use? To have readers turn away because it doesn't load faster enough, or at all?
I think it is more likely that they just higher web-developers, according to some cultural norm about how to select devs and about what features to specify. And those devs choose frameworks according to other cultural norms about what makes a good web framework. They are partly, but not completely constrained in this by the requested features set.
The result is bloated JS applications where mere pages are required, but the complexity of the system, and the social inertia is so great that nobody can fix, or even perceive the problem.
They want their websites to make more money. If this takes some more time to (eventually) load but results in increase of total income, they have all incentives to add the "bloat". You know, boarding a train or a bus could be so much faster if the checking of tickets were not involved.
> wouldn't that mean AMP is not a desired product?
Well, kind of, in the same way that common-sense lightweight HTML/CSS/JS pages aren't a desired product for the people who make those decisions on publisher websites.
If AMP went away tomorrow I would just browsing on my phone. Ad blockers are not good enough, and I refuse to fight popups and scroll blockers and blah blah blah in 2017.
I fully support a "faster page spec" that search engines incentivize, just like I support a ranking boost for using HTTPS.
But AMP isn't that; AMP is incentivizing the payment of tribute data to Google under the veneer of a faster page spec, to steer the rhetoric more favorably for the company.