How important are title tags, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and meta keywords for news stories?

I work for a news station, and we use Wordpress as our CMS. When we write a news article for our website, we have options to put in a title tag, a meta description, and meta keywords. Almost always, I notice colleagues leaving these fields completely blank.

We can also customize URL slugs so they're not exact matches of article headlines, but that too is almost never done by anyone except me.

From an SEO standpoint, are those still considered worthwhile things to fill out in 2026?

Insights appreciated.