"One widely circulated blog post written back in October claimed Google was stealing traffic from publishers via its AMP pages. But that wasn’t true."
I suspect the writer didn't really look into what the publishers were saying. AMP shoved a UI element at the top of your content that, when you interact with it, goes back to Google.
End users already know how to use a back button. So, adding another one, without being clear about what it was, would certainly create more traffic to google, and fewer "second pageviews" of your content/site. Google knows that the top portion of the page is the most valuable.
I suspect the writer didn't really look into what the publishers were saying. AMP shoved a UI element at the top of your content that, when you interact with it, goes back to Google.
End users already know how to use a back button. So, adding another one, without being clear about what it was, would certainly create more traffic to google, and fewer "second pageviews" of your content/site. Google knows that the top portion of the page is the most valuable.