If people would do that there would be no need for AMP. The whole concept is mostly "Google tells people their webpages suck and puts them into a cage where they can guarantee that they don't suck".
To me, AMP feels like a method for Google to sidestep the real issue at hand.
They probably ran a waterfall, asking AppNexus, Pubmatic, TradeDesk and 40 other ad providers for an ad at $5, $2, $1, etc. before giving up and serving a Google ad...
Google's spider uses headless chrome which runs Javascript (to index flash and Ajax content). Why can't they detect how long it takes to run your page before getting useful content?
What about just penalizing Javascript?
What about penalizing download size?
I can see why Google would do this AMP thing. It's much easier to detect fast websites through positive rather than negative evidence.
Why? Because most sites are not just a single landing page -- they have links, or tabs, or new pages, and each request could take 0.2 seconds.
So instead of requesting a new page at the time of clicking on a link, and then re-loading your entire page, you just fetch information predictively and mutate the DOM to give a feeling of <instant>, faster than even an HTML CSS page behind a CDN.
I agree with you. My site was already fairly lightweight, but I wanted to see if AMP improved things and made a better user experience.
It made it slightly faster, but other than that, didn't create a big enough impact for me to notice.
Reasons?
* Apparently the HTML should be minified.
* Apparently I should use gzip, because 4.95kb is too big.
* The inline styles are below the content to prevent showing the user nothing as it paints. Google thinks the 594 bytes of styles needs to be in a separate request.
I think insights is pretty useless at analysing sites below a certain size threshold.
At these sizes, network latency is the biggest drain on loading a page... Which effectively means users don't notice loading times when they click a link.