Final remark: You absolutely buried the lede. Of course the idea is for the NYT to see all messages from its followers as well, not just their own follows. They should also be able to search and discover anyone that is on the atmosphere (after all, the first thing that journalists will want to do when investigating a person is to see their social media presence). With that in mind, what would be a real estimate for operating costs? I'm really taking your "EDIT" as admission that ATProto will only be able to claim "actually decentralized" once it changes into something that resembles ActivityPub.
https://storage.mushroomlabs.pro/com.communick.mastodon.media/media_attachments/files/113/796/019/379/159/074/original/e30c985a8a63fbe2.png