> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
"…but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us."
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues.
NYT's revenue and subscription base are both increasing quite well.
Ad revenue was up 20%, and profit was up 26% in Q4. Revenue was over $700,000,000. 12,300,000 people pay for the New York Times.
NYT is perhaps an exception for well understood reasons. However, my local newsagent sells only a fraction of the magazine titles (conservatively 25%) of what it sold two to three decades ago. Many of those absent publications haven't transitioned to online but have ceased publication altogether.
Moreover, daily newspapers (the ones that have survived) are only about a third (or even less) as thick as they used to be in the 1990s, their classified ads are now almost nonexistent. And broadsheet format newspapers were kill off at the same time for the same reasons.
The internet has been devastating for the industry, ipso facto, the loss of revenues - both for physical print and online - has resulted lower journalistic standards hence the shithouse mess the publications industry is in today.
Sure, but GP’s still right: savvy internet users are a rounding error in volume … and thus revenue as well. So whatever forces are enshittifying news websites, they’ll not reconsider because power users complain.