Well sure, Google isn't dumb. Adding in enough benefits (speed, carousel placement) to your Trojan horse ensures there are plausible reasons to bring it into the fort.
Publishers certainly wouldn't give up the most important bits of their page (the top), and cede left/right swipe hijacking (on carousel loaded pages) if there weren't some perceived benefit.
It used to be the "World Wide Web" but now it is the "Google Platform" and we just live in it. After Google established that useful web search was possible the realized that the #1 competitor for their ads was organic rankings, and if you could really get a #1 ranking by investing in the best content then why would you spend money on ads?
So since then it is has been about deliberately degrading the search results so you learn to look at the ads instead, giving people bad S.E.O. advice, etc.
The conspiracy here seems to refer to the accusation that Google is trying to actively make their search results worse, in order to force people to buy ads.
That post does seem to be paying lip service to actual benefits for users (such as speed), but then ... suddenly ignore them in favour of a Trojan horse metaphor that doesn't make much sense to me.
It would be hard to prove Google is purposefully making the organics lower quality. On the other hand, it's obvious they are shifting them down the page over time, which has a similar effect.
As for the Trojan horse metaphor, it is my opinion that's what AMP is. It's tricking publishers into ceding control of their websites. I suspect Google will, over time, leverage AMP to further march towards a walled garden. It is, though, an opinion. Hard for me to "prove" something I'm not privy to.
No, I'm not implying they're purely anything. As most of these things go, they're a mix of both business convenience and someone pushing to fix a problem they perceive on the web. Your post took into account only one dimension of an issue.
80% of the ads you see on the web come from Doubleclick adserver - owned by Google. Perhaps you should ask why they do not optimize that system and use site speed in search rankings instead?
HN starts caring a lot about the integrity of the sacred HTML when it's their own content being mangled.
User experience is only valid as an argument in the context of that darn, biased "mainstream media" being dismembered by ad blockers, or held for ransom by "Brave".
Publishers certainly wouldn't give up the most important bits of their page (the top), and cede left/right swipe hijacking (on carousel loaded pages) if there weren't some perceived benefit.