There's a whole bunch of perfect Wordle clones that get ~none of the traffic Wordle gets, and none of the viral word-of-mouth spread. The NYT uses word games as a subscription driver. So that's what they're buying here.
They could implement Wordle themselves, of course, but they wouldn't get the traffic or the interest from players.
The game itself is a clone of other games decades earlier, and the name is also non original.
Still not sure what they bought.