... the funny thing is, I know enough about how the search core is built to make an educated guess at how this happened.
Search core farms the query out to (possibly dozens of) completely independent software engines to answer the query. Those engines have their own backing datastores and they don't synchronize to each other; it's necessary they don't to make search fast. So it's entirely possible that the Top Stories core is pulling data that is more recent while the AI Overview core has built its information off of an older search result cache (and possibly hot-cached this answer before the NYT confirmed the death when the news broke locally / on social media). Google, as an institution, leans on the tradeoff "eventual consistency is good enough," so this kind of bug is seen as a predictable side-effect of the chosen tradeoffs.
Does that make us feel better?
No, nor should it. Get your shit together, Google.
