I despise Michelle Goldberg with all my heart and soul. I think her whole job is to take liberal controversies and squeeze them through the NYT's banality filter, wrap it up in pseudo-intellectual, but still relatable, language and then claim all the twitter accolades she can handle. She is oh so worried about "cancel culture" now when she was one of the loudest voices calling for Al Franken to resign because of literal, actual, verifiable right wing lies, because it was more important to her to be "on the right side of history" than to actually consider a source. Not sure how she still has a job. This op-ed would have read as somewhat reasonable to me despite some of the problems you point out were it not penned by her.
To me, the whole Franken thing is a basically unforgivable sin. I understand that there are a lot of people who have it worse than Al, so I'm not going to have that conversation. But the reasons it angers me so much is because it was so easy. Franken was the one senator willing to hold the administration's feet to the fire. He's the sole reason Sessions recused himself from Russia. The GOP, having no shame, soul, or scruples, were like, "Hey, me too is a thing right now, let's try to fuck Al Franken, because he's a pain in our ass." So they got some woman to make up some lies (and like I said, they're verifiable lies...not let's-believe-women-when-there's-grey-area type of ambiguities), then were like, "Aren't you gonna run Al out of town?" Morons who lack imagination like Goldberg, were like, "Yep." As were a bunch of the senators who ran for president. The only circumstance in which I'll have to fight my instincts to vote Biden is if he picks Kamala Harris. She was one of the others who decided that neither facts nor the country matter as much as her personal career advancement. FWIW I also think Chuck Shumer should self-immolate. Easily manipulated bandwagon jumpers are some of the worst people to have running a country.