To get AMP-like speed you'd need: CDN, no render-blocking javascript, minimized image files, "lazy-loaded" assets & inlined CSS for "Above the Fold" content. On the server side you want to cache content with something like Varnish & send it over an "Edge" network like Akamai or Fastly. Ideally everything is served over HTTP2 or SPDY.
Doing all that replicates what AMP does.
There are other parts of AMP I am less okay with, but tbh I trust the publishers even less than I trust Google with respect to sketchy tracking bugs and data collection and useless javascript ux.
If you make a living from a content site, you have to play ball and create AMP versions of all your pages.
OR, you can choose to lose to your competitors. Let’s stop pretending like that’s really a choice, or that any sizable share of users will ever switch to DuckDuckGo.
This is where we need government to step in and regulate Google’s de facto monopoly on search.
I'd be more inclined to side with publishers here if AMP was the only way to get this. But as an awful lot of content sites are run by folks very mad that they can't run their own invasive tracking and analytics, my sympathy is limited.
I haven't seen a single non-AMP article there, and I've been checking for a year.
The second part is correct. I hate Reddit AMP results, and I'm happy that Google is telling them to fix it. I'll be even happier when they and other search engines demote Reddit AMP pages that do not match the canonical pages.
Is there some kind of real news about Reddit AMP changing, specifically? I don't see that in the link.
As such, all you needed to do to get similar rankings was use any sort of CDN hosting for your page and you would get similar results to using AMP.
Also, it sorta seems to me like the author is complaining, "I can't just do a minimum effort AMP page for the search juice, I actually have to make a functional AMP offering or not use AMP at all." Strictly as a consumer, I feel like maybe Google is doing me a favor while telling off a publisher.