Ventura newsd maxing out internet connection downloading large amounts of data

I found a thread about this happening on Big Sur, but apparently it's still a problem under Ventura:

Woke up my 16" M1 MacBook Pro running Ventura 13.2.1 and noticed the internet was extremely slow. After a while, I checked out Activity Monitor to discover that "newsd" was completely maxing out my relatively slow (25Mbit) download capacity, and had already pulled down 1GB of... who knows what, with no sign of stopping.

I read modest amounts of news on my iPhone but I don't think I've even opened the News app on my Mac for months, so there was certainly no reason it should have been downloading hundreds of MB in the background after waking from sleep.

After poking around here, an older thread pointed to the iCloud News sync as the culprit. Indeed, I turned that off, and the download instantly stopped. Newsd is still running, but is completely idle like you'd expect.

I have no idea what iCloud News sync synchronizes, but I only had it on since I figured it wouldn't hurt anything, which at least some of the time clearly is not the case.

In any case I thought I'd post turning it off as a solution in case it benefits someone else.