Actually, if you read Sy Damile's (a former General Counsel of the US Copyright office) testimony to Congress (which is really worth a read), he makes a very go

Actually, if you read Sy Damile's (a former General Counsel of the US Copyright office) testimony to Congress (which is really worth a read), he makes a very good point that the smaller the training data set the less likely that the resulting model would qualify for fair use of the data as it would be more likely that the model would not be transformative and would be prone to reproduce the training data. So arguably the importance of including the NYT and everyone else collectively in opt out selection is precisely because it makes the NYT individually less important in the final model.