Tribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.
This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see.
For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off.
AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ...
Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you.
Silly me.
...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage.
How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?
No one won here except some people with an axe to grind and actual web users.
Hopefully web vitals can be a similar forcing function for dev teams with managers, leading to better quality for users.
They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine.
They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.
I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way.
The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.
It was just another power grab, and publishers went with it because AMP sites were given priority in the SERPs.
Anyway, this has been talked about in many threads over 100's of comments.
It's not that simple. If the slow sites have better content and/or Google's customers (i.e., the people searching) expect those sites then Google has to deliver, or at least try. Keep in mind, it's also possible those slow site were spending ad money. Like it or not, Google can't intentionally piss them off.
I'm not saying AMP was an ideal solution. Only that it was smarter than nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.
They also broke scrolling for years and since the desktop experience was poor you had to deal with a hokey non-standard sharing widget.