> If someone stood behind their web developers and management with a whip, forcing them to build decent web sites and disallowing them from adding bloat, AMP would likely be unnecessary.
sadly it's the management, marketers, sales who are standing behind them and holding the whip. Most places measure engineering quality by how many features you can push through your CI/CD pipe (minus the fault-reports, breakage that the pipeline generates).
When everything works perfectly it isn't appreciated as it indicates that engineering isn't running at full capacity. The same problem we have with security and all resilience topics: how do you measure & budget (or in security monetize) something that is supposed to be invisible to the end-user?
As for AMP it's not just a tire-fire it's a clear attempt to break the open web and create lock-in for competitors.