I don't think anyone (yet) imagines all the humans at the NYT will be replaced by GPTX+DALL-E. We still have editors even though humans author the articles.
If you look closely at most of the images, they don't look quite right. There are usually artefacts, or slight misunderstandings of the brief etc. Its about 80% of the way there, but I think that last 20% is going to be a lot more difficult.
I'm sure there are some cool applications for this - maybe if you need a quick and cheap image for your newsletter, personal website or an experimental game for example.
For a serious commercial application I would think it would be easier and safer to pay someone.
I think this understates the market. For every New York Times article, there are millions of newsletters, analyst reports, tshirts, websites, logos, etc. Many of them are abstract eye candy and don't need photorealism.
Actually, even the high-budget articles often have pretty abstract art. I read this Wired article yesterday, and all the illustrations could easily have been generated:
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
DALL-E 2 is useful now. It's easy to imagine it replacing 99designs, Getty Images, and most of the digital art services on fiverr. I can't imagine what is going to happen in the world of print-on-demand tshirts.
And of course porn... what a market.