I still fondly recall Elon Musk getting rid of Twitter's astonishing number of superfluous tech workers, who exclaimed, "Without us, you are doomed! Do you hear us, DOOMED!
He replaced them with a much leaner group of his resident geniuses and ... Everything went pretty smoothly.
I was just gonna say the same thing. It’s not like they are dong anything ground breaking or different than every other major newspaper. Probably using some form of COTS software used by other newspapers for subscriptions, article management, etc. they can modify to fit their needs.
Sure you need some help desk staff, sysadmins, developers, etc. to keep things up to date and secure and make minor changes as needed. Probably could be done with say, half the current staff.
The NY Times is now basically a web site - only a print few copies are sold.
It does take a large staff to run a complex web site. They probably have a truly gigantic server farm - hundreds of web servers, hundreds of app servers, and a huge database. This does require people who know what they’re doing, lots of them.