Learning isn’t stealing, but if you’d set up a forum or hotline where paid staff would answer questions and write essay directly based on NYT content without a license for that content, that would probably be deemed illegal.

I would highly doubt it, because news outlets and blogs rehash each others' reporting all the time. How many times have you seen an article start with "Today <XYZ publication> broke the news that..."?

Since this is a copyright fight, rights extend only to verbatim copies of the full work or significant portions thereof. Abstract things like facts, ideas, concepts, themes, and patterns are explicitly not protected, and rightfully so. Yet those abstract things are what get repeated and distributed, and are what get encoded into model weights.

This is probably plaintiffs' biggest challenge because it has been very hard to get models to regurgitate entire works except for a very small handful of extremely popular works (and now there are guardrails against even that.)