Kind of, some of the time. In practice, that massive amount of render-blocking JavaScript made it slower - I noticed this on a daily basis using the web on the subway here in DC. The Washington Post loaded consistently faster without AMP, but the big win was the long tail where you could read content on normal pages but AMP was either blank until you reloaded, or took 5-10 seconds longer because once the AMP JS loaded it then had to fetch all of the resources it’d blocked behind a lazy-loader.
And this is huge.
Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing.
AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP.
Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.
Thank goodness its falling out of favor.
I addressed this in another comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423), but I disagree. The fundamental problem is one of incentives—individual companies don't have the leverage to fight back against ad companies and advertisers that want to implement bad user experiences and slow loading JS. Google's adoption of AMP forces publishers and ad networks fall into line, by enforcing limits on floating ads, popover, interstitials, custom JS, etc. Is this self-interested on Google's part? Maybe. But it's hard to argue that it's not ultimately better for the consumer.
Compared to an unfiltered web experience. AMP content is still burdened with mountains of unnecessary JS that hurts performance.
That's not my experience. Every time I try reading a long article on an AMP page, the experience basically crashes. Text rendering stops and you're just scrolling through a blank white pages.
It tries to be too clever with its rendering. And it fails almost every time.