Lean websites are NOT featured in the Top Stories carousel, only AMP websites, so this is not primarily about page speed. If page speed would be the main reason for AMP, they'd simply continue to demote websites that have poor performance in search results, and they'd curtail the main bloat from sites in Chrome, ads and trackers.
But I agree that Google has used this talking point successfully so far to bully publishers into giving up autonomy on their websites in exchange for being featured in top results, even when these sites have a great score on PageSpeed Insights.
Google plans to change that as part of it's current focus on Core Web Vitals and non-AMP sites will be eligible to be in the Top Stories carousel if they're fast enough
AMP has done nothing for speeding up the web in general; in fact I know web properties that implemented AMP instead of focusing on core speed issues with their main site.
It's also notable that AMP projects almost always originate in an SEO strategy, not engineering.
Google was on the right track by including side speed as a signal in ranking. From Google's perspective, that became problematic because it started disproportionately punishing sites that run lots of ads... AKA some of Google's most important customers. AMP is a site speed initiative that is more compatible with Google's corporate strategy.
Yes. But AMP wouldn't have had much value if sites were fast enough, Google used that as an excuse or maybe a genuine strategy turned into a lock-in plan.
The hipster macbook pro webshit who doesn't know what O(n) means, and the jobsworth drone manager who couldn't see beyond quarterly profits don't have any rights to cry about AMP now. People like AMP pages as evident from many discussions, because they feel faster than the rest of the web.
Almost every AMP page I went to felt slower than when I went to the real page behind it.
I think a significant portion of that was that AMP wants everything rendered in a single paint. As opposed to the typical news site which shows the article for a while, then later hides it when the javascript had time to run. Seeing an article while the page finishes loading feels a lot faster than seeing a white screen until the page finishes loading, even if the content moving around on the first one is annoying.
