It's easy to armchair quarterback and say that. But the reasons and incentives behind web page bloat are complicated, and saying "Just make your page load faster! Just get rid of the ads and trackers!" is about as useful as abstinence-only sex ed. AMP is theoretically a way to have your cake and eat it too: all of the revenue from these ads and trackers, without the bloat. And it's at least somewhat open, compared to Apple News and Facebook Articles. It's not hard to see why publishers would gladly jump on board.
> all of the revenue from these ads and trackers, without the bloat.
That is impossible. AMP is just forcing some changes and using better tech architecture for the rest. There are already slow AMP pages because of all the re-added plugins, trackers, media and ads.
Other sites could easily work on better tech delivery to improve performance without AMP, which now only decreases the amount of resources/time they have to work on their own site.
The WSJ is a large site that gets lots of traffic. I assume they have a competent web team, which knows that long load times on mobile suck and knows how to do performance optimization to some degree. I am willing to bet that whatever low-hanging fruit there was to improve their PLT has already been plucked, and the remaining slowness is the complicated stuff I mentioned earlier.
That's why I think statements like your original comment are unhelpfully reductionist, and my paraphrasing of them was not misleading.
Or..... they could just get rid of the bloat. I'm sorry that so many sites suck at building web-pages, but that's not really my problem. I have no problem un-blocking sites that are respectful, and I often do, but pretending like this is a good thing for users is just silly.
