I subscribe to the NYT partly for the daily word games.

They had a survey a few months ago and that made me think about why... I realized many days, the only positive interaction with encouraging words for me was solving those games.

It’s presumably just a way to pipeline people into the crossword subscription.

It's probably more effective than FB ads. Their ads were manipulative and make them look like some dodgy paper. Something like Wordle lends them some credibility.

Might just be for publicity... Wordle is a massive buzzword right now, arguably the fastest way to get clicks.