The folks involved in the project very likely had nothing to do with the business side of the New York Times website; as well as likely to have the ability to turn off site-wide embedded snippets of code.
Well this is the whole point of privacy, right? Individuals or teams may have a perspective, but the business ultimately wins.
Looking at the screenshot, it's not clear which elements on the console are trackers. Why not just paste a screenshot of Ghostery, which shows the exact names of the tracking cookies in an easy to read panel?
Given the context, I hope NYT recognizes the irony and at least tries to practice a less intrusive analytics strategy.