AMP launched in 2015. At that time, Larry Page was CEO, Eric Schmidt was Chairman and David Drummond was the Chief Legal Officer. I don't know how any of them signed off on AMP.
Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created.
For a company that is (or should be) very careful about attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems completely reckless.
And what is the upside for Google here? Fast pages? That seems like one hell of a gamble.
And on the user side? I, as a user, absolutely hate AMP and wish I could opt out.
I have poor vision so use larger fonts on iOS. AMP pages routinely render with the edge of pages cropped off and you can't scroll so here so this happens to me way too often:
1. Click on a link
2. Get an AMP page
3. Can't read the page, click back
4. Force touch the link to bring up the preview of the page, which is the non-AMP version
5. Click on that preview to get the non-AMP page.
Why is this still an issue? Why can't I just get this version of the page always? It's ludicrous.
But I honestly don't know why Google pushed so hard on AMP.