I honestly don't understand why companies do this. There's still SO MUCH traffic from Google for these things.

I've routinely went to AnandTech EXCLUSIVELY from Google. This means that their "news" and new content is of little relevance to me, as it's usually something from a few years prior that I'm reading over there. Yet somehow, "have to publish every day"?!

Part of me thinks that this is related to the inefficiencies of all these CMS, where it costs too much to run the site compared to the revenue from the ads.

Or is there another reason?

Frankly, as an nginx "practitioner", all of these sites could basically be cached and served from a single $50/mo server from Hetzner, Online or OVH. Aren't they're getting far more in ad revenue than that? How does it make any sense to close the shop when you've got such a treasure trove that you could continue milking easily for at least like half a decade?