I suspect it's unfair to blame the photographers on the ground directly for this. Often photographers will take a number of shots from different angles and at different focal lengths and at different moments. At least in some publications after that they will have then had only very limited input into which images got used (or whether their images or someone else's were used).
In these cases it is/was an editorial decision. If editorial staff had multiple images to choose from like this then it's hard to see a decision to use the most crowded-looking photos (which it's pretty hard to argue isn't what happened) as a completely innocent one.