Oh man, someone advocating for right to repair but linking an AMP article on HN? Surely this will lead to some fun discussion
In this case, it's just a light version of the article with the same content. That seems objectively better. If AMP wasn't incidentally in the URL path you wouldn't have noticed it was AMP. If the existence of AMP encourages people to write faster, less cruft-y pages, that's a good thing to me.
AMP isn't a requirement to build small, fast, performant websites. The fact that The Verge ignores those qualities with their non-AMP website is on them.
Yes, the overall user experience is better. It's not that the experience is bad, it's more about the means they're using to reach those ends.
I see AMP as a set of training wheels that Google was able to get publishers to adopt. All the tools were available for publishers and their developers to make performant/clean sites to begin with, they just chose not to do so. AMP is basically a standardized form of "the way they should have built their site in the first place".
My other issue with AMP is that it makes companies focus on performance for mobile, but not for desktop. Why not build a quality, high-performance site for all platforms?
At the end of the day, is AMP a net positive? Maybe, I'm willing to consider the end result, but I don't think it's a problem for us to explore and criticize the means or the reality that necessitated AMP's existence.