The NYT makes money from paid subscriptions. Anything that increases the virality of their subscriber acquisition is going to make back a whole bunch of money. There are lots of people that subscribe to the NYT principally for the games, which Wordle fits into nicely.

This deal makes perfect sense for NYT. I don't see it making sense for a lot of other companies (they don't already have an engine that you can stick games into and get subscriber dollars out of, and building that engine will swamp the cost of Wordle itself), but here, sure.