Whether it was a shadowy executive cabal or a couple of overzealous minions who proposed WEI is kind of immaterial. Google has too much power to decide the fate of the Web, and no incentive not to exploit that power, and something must be done to stop it before it's too late.
What makes you think they'd listen to the W3C if they said "don't do it"?
They'd likely just spin up an "independent" body to manage the specification and publish it outside of the auspices of the W3C. That's what the did with AMP, after all, which sits under the OpenJS Foundation now.
Google kept promising that the search-rank benefits you'd get through AMP would be available via standardized means. And they worked hard to follow through on what, continues to seem to me, to be an excellent wonderful set of technologies that allows impressive & powerful "Local-First"/offline-capable systems for the web, which I really wish had wider adoption (WebBundle & signed http exchanges).
Google themselves actively worked to make AMP non-critial, to make it an implementation detail / toolkit rather than a top-down mandate. And the general idea is solid. To me, there were two major themes: fast rendering components that won't force redraw & wouldn't even block, and the ability to embed/transclude content so Google themselves could feel safe letting you isolated-ly display your content on their search results. The modern incarnations of this idea are very privacy preserving (originally it was less so).
It is a warped point of view, in my opinion, to accuse OpenJS of being a Google puppet with "scare quotes" ""independent" body" nonsense meant to frighten & terrify. OpenJS is home to Node.js, webpack, jQuery, Dojo, and many others. OpenJS has not been a problem or a shill. This was a sensible place for open activity. It's a Linux Foundation project, which - while it has problems (it doesn't do jack to get independent developers a dime, and fuck that noise) - is a fairly respectable organization for collaboration & concern.
To me there's just so much conspiracy-mindedness & reactionary-ism around WEI. This is one topic that deserves the bombasticness, that we should react hard to! But there are processes and checks. Google is far & away the most up-front most-clear, is by far the earliest company to talk about & discuss plans & ideas, and the only company anywhere that has any process for trying stuff/getting data without any commitment to it (Origin Trials).
It's so concerning to me how much it feels like people want to lose their minds over stuff. These chain reactions of negativity are such a power in the world today, but whether or not they have truth & perspective & whether they contribute or distort the dialectic is of such high concern. I struggle to think of what pieces of @m2ys4u's post here contributes & informs & is well coached, but I see so much of it that is aimed to exacerbate, instigate, reactionary-ize. I've tried hard to acknowledge some truths about early AMP, and that was a shitty time, but 2015 was a long time ago and most of Google's promises at the time to follow-through on enhancing rather than controlling the web seem to have been quite seriously followed through on.
