You can believe the information coming out of the war zone is too corrupted to draw conclusions without being motivated by wanting to disagree with the New York Times.

There have been several major, heavily hyped stories about the war so far that just weeks later were admitted to be deliberate lies to booster Ukrainian morale. The Ghost of Kiev and his many kills: never existed. The "fuck you Russian battleship" guy who turned out to be captured, not heroically self sacrificed. Etc. These events weren't mere exaggerations, they were entirely made up.

Given this it's pretty reasonable for rational people to assume we have no idea how the war is going. After all, for every made up Russian kill that gets detected there must be many more that don't. And the same in the opposite direction with Russian state media of course.