This NYTimes piece is garbage, a typical "think of the children" appeal to get you outraged rather than a serious discussion of the problem. It doesn't actually describe the scope of the problem, nor does it appreciate the difficulties in addressing the problem.
You can tell a story is garbage when it seeks to make you outraged over "baffling" injustices, rather than seeking to explain why. There are good reasons for Google's position, which the story seeks to hide from you rather than explain to you. 
I don't know all of Google's reasons. I do know that it's impossible to write reliable algorithms to do this automatically, and that it's impossible to recruit/retain a workforce to do it manually.
The NYTimes has two basic cliches:
1) Big Tech is evil because they invade our privacy, such as spying on all the private images we upload.
2) Big Tech is evil because they don't invade our privacy enough, such as monitoring all the images we upload for bad content.
1) Big Tech is evil because they invade our privacy, such as spying on all the private images we upload.
2) Big Tech is evil because they don't invade our privacy enough, such as monitoring all the images we upload for bad content.
I mention this because child exploitation is also rife on the border, where often children do need to be separated from the adults accompanying them. This is intermixed with Trump's (evil) policy that tries to punish immigrant parents by targeting their children.
Instead of sane reporting on the issue that clearly separates Trump's evil policy with the appropriate roll that ICE and border control do, we have only the cliche story where they are evil and everything they do is evil.
In any case, technology needs to be secure. There's no compromise that means police can find all the child pornographers but oppressive regimes can't track down dissidents. We either get both, or get neither.
Child exploitation is the #1 issue for strong crypto. It's the one thing (until the next major terrorist incident) that the police state will use to justify weakening security. Even though they don't intend it, stories like this are attacks on crypto.
