I think it's fine to have "dog bites man" stories. NYT paying money for a property and aggressively trying to defend is totally expected, but still a story worth conveying.
A publication whose only editorial goal is to give you novel information would not report "orphan crushing machine crushes 80 orphans, as it has every day since it was activated" since you probably already know about that. OTOH people are hitting adulthood every day never having heard of the orphan crushing machine, and you want to give them a chance to say "excuse me the what??"
"System working as intended" isn't new information, but making people consider the effects of that intention can be valuable. We might in fact want it to work a different way if we think about it for a bit.
NYT bought "Wordle" from an indie dev for $1M+. The article complains about the fact they're protecting their newly-bought and very expensive IP. The orphan-crushing analogy is a strawman, because Josh Wardle wouldn't have been incentivized to protect the IP. The incentive to protect "Wordle" happened when $1M+ was exchanged and has nothing to do with NYT as a company. Any company or person would do the same.
Definitely not a given, NYT made a choice to act aggressively to monetize their IP and can bear the consequences of doing so.
A classic example is Metallica suing their own fans who downloaded their music, and Radiohead who let fans name their own price for an album including $0. In all 3 cases above, all parties got to choose their own actions which all have their own outcomes.
You don’t think Radiohead has ever taken legal action to protect their IP? Radiohead sued Lana Del Ray because one of her songs sounded like Creep.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with protecting your personal brand.
And it’s even less aggressive with NYT because they can only cease the use of their “Wordle” trademark