I'm surprised the NYTimes is not paying and it's not clear to me whether it's because they think it's not worth the money or because of pride.
Twitter has lost a lot of good users and communities, but it's still relatively usable and stable. It's not going to survive another artificial engagement squelch targeted at non-paying posters. So either Musk will do that and there's no reason to pay for a dead platform, or he won't do it and it's better not to pay him. But the real argument is that enough people refuse to pay, perhaps it will speed up the process of forcing Musk to back off from his current approach and instead focus on making the platform better for all users (and hence bringing back high-paying advertisers) rather than doubling down on this failing subscription idea.