My counterpoint would be: if these sites were hemorrhaging money, and the history seems to indicate they are given they were all sold at literal fire sale prices to GHP by Univision, then how would it make sense to continue on a "nothing changes" path? Maybe there were better ideas and implementations and no doubt this new strategy is unlikely to work, but this weird idea that "why can't they just let them do what they want and how they know how to do it" doesn't make any sense if there was no path to profitability.
Univision paid $135m for Gawker/Gizmodo/etc (later turned into GMG) a few years ago after the Hulk Hogan lawsuit essentially bankrupted them (why Univision bought them is a mystery for the ages). They sold all the sites plus the onion and a few other things to GHP (Green Hill Partners, an equity firm) for well under $50m, possibly under $20m. Those kind of prices means the sites were in really bad shape, cash flow wise. There wasn't a single "gem" among them they could try to rescue.
I wonder if valuations of all these kind of media properties will continue to plummet, as people realize that there may not really be an effective way to run mid to larger sized journalist properties like this without essentially banking on a billionaire to view it as a charity project.