As someone who has (once) written an opinion piece for the NYT, I wonder how much the published piece resembled the author's original text. My experience: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opini...
At first sitting back and reading the suggested edits and changes in place I had a similar first reaction as you did, but after doing the "walk away, do something else and come back to your writing later" thing, I found the opinion was still there though much less verbose.
Share that to say, the editorial process itself, even for opinion pieces-is rather....well... opinionated.
Would it be nice to see if a publication just decided to run editorials contrary to or perhaps ones that eviscerated a viewpoint or position said publication has been known to hold-and entertain plurality for plurality's sake?
Probably. If that's what the readers have come to expect, probably.
But as a default condition of running a newspaper? I think senior editors like keeping their jobs too much for that.
They are personified by the Clinton family, yet are more pro-Bush than say pro-BernieSanders or pro-GaryJohnson.
With Trump's alternate-establishment weirdness and the extent polarization of modern US politics, the right wing is rejecting the NYT and thus pushing them farther left to maintain readership by catering to replacement readers.