See: Newsweek's "marriage crunch" of 1986. Simply put, everyone has anxiety about love, romance, companionship and our place in society. Articles such as the NYMag example prey on those anxieties. Articles that say "really, nothing's changed, calm down" do not get repeated... unless they can salaciously trash the purveyors of the first article. We wouldn't have even gotten any counter-coverage of Newsweek's "a woman over 35 is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married" howler if people didn't get such a rise out of slagging on Newsweek. Fortunately, Newsweek is hilarious.
Mmmm... I remain unconvinced. I remember the moral panic over discussing AIDS in sex ed. I remember the moral panic when Murphy Brown had a child out of wedlock. I remember the moral panic when Match.com hit the scene. It's not like Tinder is something new; it's the appification of Hot or Not which, yes, created its own moral panic. The '80s and '90s were really the nadir of sexual freedom, compared to what the '60s and '70s had. Even the '50s had more sexual freedom than is popularly known for the simple fact that it wasn't addressed. I content it remains much ado about nothing.