You are making my point for me: “you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue.” That is simply an attempt to explain away the bad experience of reading the Times. The explanation is probably correct. But by offering explanations for why the site is bad, you are implicitly agreeing that it is bad.
I wouldn't call it "bad". I'd say it's not perfect, and rightly so, because perfection would be lower ROI than some other things their developers could be doing.
