Generally writing should be judged based on what the author was trying to accomplish, as in this case, does it make a compelling case to its intended audience?

And the intended audience is clearly people who care quite a lot about the "inside baseball" of NYT/Journalism and the media more broadly.

So how the general reader perceives this is irrelevant. It wasn't written for the general reader!

I don't read articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and claim the writing is poor because...it's not written for me and I wouldn't even know where to start in critiquing it.