As a user I like AMP because it's guaranteed to be very fast. There, I said it.
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.
No, pretty sure I covered both. Maybe you're thinking of one of the replies to my post?
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.
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.
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".