I don't care whether AMP "helps publishers"—I think AMP holds publishers accountable for their (accidental or careless) UX disasters, and prevents them from happening in the first place.
All of this crap is because sw engineers don't have a professional association with an ethics board. Can you imagine if you could put the experience of your users first and tell your business to fuck off when they ask for this nonsense secure that they really can't just fire you and find someone who will sell out.
AMP definitely does not hold anyone accountable. Look at Reddit. Absolutely atrocious UX after AMP from what is just a basic forum. Instead, AMP makes everyone - regardless of content, design, or purpose - obey the same Google-approved standard of design, using Google-approved fonts and Google-approved CSS. In my view, AMP is the UX disaster because I hate the way it looks and have to remove the AMP from every news article I read. Oftentimes, publishers have a better idea of how their content should look than Google does. Especially smaller ones which have a strong focus on design.
This is just completely false. You can use webfonts and custom CSS on AMP. There are some common-sense limitations, like limiting the total size of the CSS, but I've never run into an issue where I had a design that I couldn't achieve on AMP due to CSS constraints.
> the constant pressures from ads departments is the issue
The problem is that sales departments don't work in isolation—they're beholden to the broader pressures of the marketplace. It's a classic coordination problem—the industry is caught in a race-to-the-bottom of ad quality, and as long as you can make a few extra bucks per month by adding more and more intrusives ads, you're going to do so. Google has the ability to set different incentives for publishers, because they control a lot of traffic, which turns into revenue.
If AMP only was a stricter subset of HTML with some limits on page size I don't think the backlash would be so hard. Instead it's a framework that includes massive overhead, third party dependencies, explicit carve-outs for ads and a unnecessary 7 second load delay if you choose not to load their js.
EDIT: Also built in scroll-jacking, hiding the actual origin of the content, and a bunch of other anti-features.
This is one of those things where google might have started with a good idea, but the reasonable person left the room after a single-sentence pitch and left it up to whatever braintrust of marketers and LOC-counting managers stayed.