What's interesting to me is that in Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model, one of the factors that make corporate media like the NYT the voice of the state and large corporations is their need for advertising dollars. If they even slightly flinch in their editorial line, the ad dollars go elsewhere, which Chomsky documented.

I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other large corporations rather than in some sense serving their readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising revenue starting in 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html

The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those people believe many of the same things the corporations believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented towards invading other countries which they currently nearly always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers of the business community off the editorial line of the nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.