They're not separable, though. AMP entirely depends on the existence of Google in order to see any benefit from it, even without cacheing layer. Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance; if they did, I would have explained to them that we already could have good performance now if they stopped asking us to overload their pages with tracking scripts, ads, and other useless crap, and allowed engineers the time to address performance issues.
Without Google, AMP alone doesn't have the speed or the technical advantage to make it worth it. Google's neatest trick is their attempt at framing AMP as something akin to an open-source project that has nothing to do with them when, in reality, it has everything to do with them.
P.S. AMP does give engineers an out by allowing them to build pages from scratch without the cruft imposed upon the OG pages by their employers, but this could be easily avoided by product owners making better(and rather obvious) decisions rather than always making the more exciting ones that cause a lot of dilly dallying and technical debt. Still, at the end of the day, on its own is just busy-work.
> Having worked for a few companies that wanted to implement AMP, including one which was a media firm, they both wanted AMP for the SEO benefits. The "carousel" was like where they wanted to be, and they didn't give a flying shit about improving page performance;
And that's exactly why I can't hate AMP. Publishers don't give a fuck about performance, and user experience in general as long as they get clicks that can be monetized. They don't want to keep users for their quality content, they want to game search engine results and trap users when they get in.
Things like AMP seems to be the only way to make publishers care. Seen the other way, Google have seen the mess, and took advantage of it and made AMP, which both addresses the problem and get them a comfortable position. If sites were fast the problem wouldn't be there in the first place, and Google would have had to find something else for their monopoly.
And sure, what you said in your PS is true. Unfortunately, that's not how things are. I don't know why, greed maybe? But if it is the case, it is the stupid kind of greed, because now, publishers are struggling and Google is making shittons of money.
The advantage of AMP is precisely this: when an executive wants to put fifty tracking scripts of various sorts on an AMP page, the developers can say “this is impossible, Google doesn’t allow this”. When it’s on your site’s own page, the developer doesn’t have this leverage.
Without Google, AMP alone doesn't have the speed or the technical advantage to make it worth it. Google's neatest trick is their attempt at framing AMP as something akin to an open-source project that has nothing to do with them when, in reality, it has everything to do with them.
P.S. AMP does give engineers an out by allowing them to build pages from scratch without the cruft imposed upon the OG pages by their employers, but this could be easily avoided by product owners making better(and rather obvious) decisions rather than always making the more exciting ones that cause a lot of dilly dallying and technical debt. Still, at the end of the day, on its own is just busy-work.