A CMS team? Christ, no wonder NYTimes is losing money.
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"?