Sure, but Google can offer tooling and best practices to push people in a certain way, like they do with everything. The best way to encourage people to move to new technology on their own is to change the search algorithms to provide positive incentives to implement those changes. Look at SSL. A lot of people don't care about encryption, but they care about SEO improvements more.
Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.
They could easily heavily penalize any website delivering over 1mb of html + css + js, and have a bonus for being under 500/100/50kb total as part of their pagerank.
That would be a huge driver... if nobody with over 1mb of html+css+js would be in the top 5 results, period.
So is every Google's guideline, yet most fail to game them. Google is smart. And good people will follow the guidelines instead of testing if something can be gamed, majority of industry is afraid of Google and its guidelines.
Google's AMP policy has been aggressive and heavy-handed. You can appreciate the technology and Google's desire to make the web faster and disagree with how they are implementing it.