I doubt many readers of the LA Times food section follow the internal politics, but to those who do, it couldn’t look much worse after the Meehan debacle.
No competent manager would have led Escárcega to believe that she was getting paid as much as Addison, but the food section might have been pretty chaotic at the time, four months after Jonathan Gold died. Meehan wasn’t promoted to editor until February 2019, so I guess the hiring manager was Kimi Yoshino, who might not have had much management experience. This story confirms that Escárcega was a food writer, not a critic, at the Arizona Republic.