There's nothing wrong with metatags - those are great.

The real issue is editors are expected to give multiple titles to every article. The publishing software uses A/B Testing to figure out which one performs the best, and then stops using the other titles. It's standard practice because it effectively gets more people to read the article.

Editors also monitor which ones failed and over time learn how to write good titles. Where "good" is "generates the most traffic". A perfect example of what gets measured gets managed.

Often one of the original titles is written by the actual journalist - not the editor - and those tend to be a more accurate description of the content. Unfortunately they also don't perform very well. With most software that title is used as the URL, which doesn't change (because Google would penalise them for changing the URL).

The link to this article was "us-defence-announcement-raises-questions-on-aukus-anniversary". Honestly that's not a great title either, I can see why it failed to perform well and didn't survive A/B testing.