As someone who has worked on the integration of off the shelf CMS and as well as built in house ones, I question this statement.
There’s a lot of value in building tools that fit the domain and workflow perfectly well. It’s expensive in the short term but in the long term saves a lot of time and money.
It takes a 'team' to provide any sort of professional level of support for an organization of their size. If the one-person "CMS/tech wizard" decides to stop working, or die, or get sick, or take an extra 4 hours to be with their family, the entirety of the NYT operations should just say "oh well, we'll just wait around for a while until we find our next one person to be our tech saviour"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html