I didn't say it was the sole/only objective that must be pursued without any regard to anything else, which seems to be the straw man that that NYT article is arguing against.

But yes, a board of a for-profit corporation must pursue profits to their full reasonable capability. If they neglect that duty, they will be sued and replaced. This is, for example, why Twitter had no choice but to sell to Elon. Because that was most profitable to shareholders. Otherwise the board would have been taken to court and lost. That is fiduciary duty to profits.

The idea that it's a "fake rule" is also something people love to repeat. But that isn't true. A publicly traded corporation simply cannot choose to forgo profits for all time and invest in customer service instead, for example. There absolutely is a fiduciary duty to make decisions that are ultimately profitable. (But that obviously goes along with flexibility to e.g. invest more to defer profits, invest in nice offices to attract better employees, etc.)

>But yes, a board of a for-profit corporation must pursue profits to their full reasonable capability.

No this has been explicitly rejected by the court. The fiduciary duty a company has to it's board is to not screw them over. A company has the freedom to leave money on the table in order to do the right thing. Your shareholders have no grounds to sue you if you are doing something that doesn't produce 100% profit but still produces reasonable profit.