Agreed. Reasonably large chunks of material in A-list pubs was probably over the line of accepted practice. But way, way different from plagiarizing someone else or making stuff up. In general, I don't find anything especially wrong with judiciously reusing material. If I've explained XYZ tech in an article in the past, I may well cut-and-paste that paragraph, reworking it a bit for flow, if I need the same explanation again. Similarities might well be sufficient to be called plagiarism if it were someone else I cut-and-pasted.

That said, I would be a lot more conservative in the case of a commissioned article from a major publication.