Once again, the tech blog assumes everyone outside its own industry is stupid. My guess is every one of those sites a/b tested those ads to see if they lead to significant drops in user retention, and found that the extra eCPM grossly outweighed that.
Of course, I'm assuming they're not stupid and know about basic split testing. But the people running New York Times are probably not as smart as Robin Wauters, who is making $10 an hour blogging in his underwear.