Sure. But USA Today EU is not really a fair example. You can‘t really expect publishers to serve absolutely no ads and tracking at all. Unless you want them to die. There are initiatives like Apple News+ and Subscribe with Google but they are not mainstream yet. And individual subscriber options for news portals are way to cumbersome (and perceived as too expensive) for users.
I agree, but the solution is for ad companies to improve so you don't need tons of JavaScript to display an advert. Why can't they be done server side, rather than handled by client side JavaScript? A lot of web apps now employ SSR, so having the adverts use SSR should considerably speed them up
So even if the AMP Pages are small, they're still much larger than the page ought to be