I'm not going to defend whether this particular instance is good journalism, but Buzzfeed is not Buzzfeed News. A 2017 study in Journalism found Buzzfeed News was comparable to NYT, for what that's worth.

Using a "study in journalism" as an appeal to authority w.r.t. the reputability of a media company is really strange, citation or no.

I wasn't making an appeal to authority, I was noting that, like I said in my first sentence, Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News aren't the same thing. I then go on to say, for whatever it's worth, at least one study in journalism considered Buzzfeed News to be quite good; I very clearly neither agreed nor disagreed with that decision. It should also be obvious to the reader that there aren't any studies in journalism on the accuracy of Buzzfeed listicles, which would relate back to my original point, that Buzzfeed is not Buzzfeed News, for what it's worth.