Certainly. As you said,a hostile nation state targeting a nobody (like myself) would gain no new information by the fact that it knows I used Tor to access nyti

Certainly. As you said,a hostile nation state targeting a nobody (like myself) would gain no new information by the fact that it knows I used Tor to access nytimes. Unfortunately, intelligence community and law enforcement agencies do not presume innocence. They would presume that you're a "bad guy" who is "trying to hide". What harmless sites you visit is of little importance to them. You're a likely threat,essentially, a Tor user is an active target for proactive LE and Intelligence gathering operations. This isn't parnoia,the snowden leaks which dated around 2008 show the NSA targeting visitors of sites like linux.com (xkeyscore). When hunting for "threat" you look for the people trying to hide. For example,they love it when people use PGP encrypted emails,their sensors pick up on that and they correlate metadata gathered from that communication for further intel gathering and offensive targeting (PGP does not encrypt email metadata) So,using Tor with a nation state actor or LE agency incorporated into your threat model would be very bad in my opinion,even if all you do is visit nytimes over https via hidden service with noscript.