The general answer is no. Fair use is a special carve out legally that has to be determined individually. If your product is something that regurgitates NYT articles while stripping NYT of their source of revenue, that’s got fair odds to not qualify as fair use.

It can allow you to deduce something, depending on the answer.

If we want to establish whether scenario A is fair use or not, and we all agree that A is "worse" (regarding fair use status) than some other scenario B, then if we also agree that B is not fair use, A by definition isn't either. The opposite is not true, of course: B being fair use does not imply that A has to be as well.

I find that kind of upper/lower bound logic can be pretty useful and I think it's what the parent comment was trying to do.

On a related note, that same logic is why I think Godwin's law can be a bit misapplied now and then. Sometimes bringing up nazis/Hitler can be useful to establish some ground truth in a debate (instead of just a way to imply your opponent is actually a bad person, or, possibly, an actual nazi themselves). E.g. a conversation on the morality of violence is vastly different depending on whether you agree that violence against nazis is ok or not.

The problem is multi-dimensional, so bounding logic like this isn’t necessarily useful.

I think it can still provide value if the actual scenario at hand is so complex and fraught that conversations about it end up mostly fruitless (as I think is the case here). At least it can provide you with some mental handholds and supports for where to start reasoning about the problem, which hopefully helps in finding some small agreements, or at the very least, mutual understanding of each other's positions.