I don't even need it to be part of the ranking algorithm. Google could simply display a number of megabytes as a grey, boring number underneath a page. I think mobile users would be especially appreciative; those of us stuck on metered connections could avoid bloated news articles in favor of leaner sites covering the same story.

Wish granted! https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex...

I don't have an issue with providing amp as a service if it doesn't get treated more favorably than fast non-amp pages.

Wasn't load time already part of the algorithm? I have thought making a site not-slow was step 0 of SEO for quite a long time.

Maybe they could have increased the penalty for slowness though.

I am not sure that is much better than AMP in the burden it puts on content generators. AMP at least gives them a helping hand in being faster.

I want a useful search engine not a political one. If the most relevant result to my query is loaded with garbage web design I still want it at the top of my search results because I can decide if I want to return to that site for myself whereas I can't magically correct some unseen ranking parameter that I don't care about.

Taking page load times into account is not political in any way. Faster load times provide a better user experience.

Who is this mythical universal user for whom it provides a better experience? Your parent poster is a user and it seems his experience is better when he gets the most accurate results, not a subset that is fastest. I tend to agree.