I've seen some outlets doing that before: even if it's the IOC standard, after all, it's a "medals table" not a "olympic titles" table, and I've questioned myself a few times why they're often sorted by the golds.
As I don't know if this was a knee-jerk reaction for the US being pretty average outside the pools or if they always measured like that, I won't comment if this is an attempt to whitewash the bad results after bragging about "beating them in their own turf", and NBC avoiding an audience drop.