Amp is opt in, news corps chose to suck that dick.

And does anyone use the cached link unless the original source is down?

robots.txt is also not a Google thing, it's use dates back to the early 90s and it's a signal for web crawlers, an integral and necessary part of all indexing engines, to voluntarily not crawl your site. Using it means your site does not get indexed and wont show up in search results.

The lazy producers of our C-Tier news put themselves where they are through apathy. They had decades and millions to get a head start in the digital market but instead chose to crank out click bait that looks exactly like their dead printed editions.