I don't care what side of the issue you're on, let's not sugarcoat what's really going on here... "States" aren't "pushing back". Some people are just grandstanding.
The article also cites CA's car emission standards, which appears to be good precedent both for the legality of such measures, as well as state lawmakers' willingness and ability to enact these laws.
So I have no idea what you might be referring to by "grandstanding".
The short of it is that it's totally grandstanding. In New York, the plan isn't to try to affect the consumer market directly, it's to limit any state agency from purchasing telecommunications service with any provider that doesn't fit net neutrality rules [2]; which is obviously unlikely to do anything meaningful except make the government pay more, and hence is grandstanding.
In California, Wiener proposed the following [3]:
> * Regulate business practices to require net neutrality
> * Condition state contracts on adhering to net neutrality
> * Require net neutrality as part of cable franchise agreements, as a condition to using the public right-of-way for internet infrastructure
> * Condition the right to attach small cell or other broadband wireless communications to utility poles on adherence to net neutrality
Every point except the second one is likely to be challenged successfully in court, bringing us back to the New York problem-- pushing net neutrality by throwing the government's purchasing power behind the issue. It's legal, but the other points are likely to tie up the courts for a predictable outcome. I'm not saying that it's useless to have it play out in the courts; I think it's worth doing. I'm just saying that every representative pushing these plans forward knows that the potential effects of their legislation is primarily limited to restrictions on government spending, and thus, it's reasonable to suspect that their motivation is primarily to grandstand rather than to make a difference.
[1]: https://reason.com/blog/2017/12/19/can-states-reimpose-net-n...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/new-york-tried-e...
[3]: http://sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/20180103-senator-wiener-intro...
With that in mind, I'd personally place taking legislative actions that are doomed to fail from the start, wasting my representative's time and my tax money, under the banner of "grandstanding".
It sets a precedent. It may not be a good one. CA's regulations force anyone who makes anything with an engine to build a CA specific version. The CA's emissions laws for commercial trucks (which are subject to federal regulation) have a huge effect on businesses that have anything to do with moving goods in or out of CA. While I don't like how the commerce clause expanded over the 20th century I CA's emissions laws are begging to be struck down using it.