It's kind of a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" type of thing.
Google had the option of simply highly ranking pages that are performant and lightweight on mobile. They didn't take that option, instead they went with AMP. There's intent there. I'm not going to speculate on the intent, because it isn't relevant: the point is that because there was a simpler technical solution available that they didn't take, there is clearly intent in going the harder path. It's worth asking what that means.
AMP provides all the benefits that a well-built, well-architected site would, and that would have been the "non-evil" option. Use web standards and push people to respect them, imagine that...
But I have a problem: I like AMP because it is so fast!
Publishers have done this to themselves by loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts that slow it down to almost unusable levels.
Maybe if publishers stopped doing that, then you could start criticizing AMP.
"Some of my clients will ask me what to do with those messages. I will tell them to delete them. Ignore Google’s nudging, pay no heed."
And then your clients will be unhappy with the traffic results. Are you going to also tell your clients the drawbacks?