Post-AMP, it's easy to see why it never got solved before. Many, many detractors commenting along the lines of:
I was perfectly able to make my personal website fast; there is no problem, no one needs AMP.
I was perfectly able to make my personal website fast; there is no problem, no one needs AMP.
The kick in the pants was really Google throwing their weight around something which could have been done in a number of different things. Hell Google could have charged to use their CDN in exchange for totally not favorable ranking and an icon and raked in the cash.
To draw a crude analogy- I don't have a problem with alcohol, I don't drink in excess and that's all there is to it. So clearly, there's no reason for AA or any other detox program to exist.
That's a much better method than pushing sites to use a shitty lock-in system.
Early 2000s we had crappy Flash Websites that took a minute to load. I refused to build websites with Flash and would only build websites that were HTML and JavaScript (I HATED JS back than (Maybe it was just me)). I stopped getting business because that norm was slow websites that were pretty and had animations.
After Mobile took off in the early 2010's we had faster connections and those Flash sites worked much faster, except for mobile. Now everything is responsive and 2 or 3 seconds feels like a lifetime.
AMP changed the internet in my opinion, and maybe it isn't needed any more.