AMP was a historical irritant for me, and I do recall the tide turning over time. It was initially hard to criticize it here without your comments being downvoted pretty hard. There were a set of defenders that believed it was solely about page loading time, and that any "trojan horse" accusations were from conspiracy theorists.

I think part of it was that the AMP team members were active here, and seemed genuine and competent. I'm somewhat curious how much they knew. This delay thing wasn't the only terrible part of AMP. The initial banner with the [x] button that sent you back to Google was terrible. As is the still-present hijacking of swipes and back button behavior on other people's content.

I did an Algolia comment search and can see my AMP rants getting more traction over a 4 year period.

Edit: I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.