Years ago (over a decade now actually) when I solved printed puzzles from the newspaper I would notice such coincidental usage of the same answers (and sometimes similar cluing) between the NYT and LAT puzzles. More interesting still, I was solving the two puzzles as they were printed in the Baltimore Sun, which (I discovered later) had been running NYT daily puzzles one or two weeks after the NYT actually ran them, but the LAT puzzles were current. I think most of the apparently concurrent words I was noticing were more common fill words than your examples, but when I realized the NYT puzzles I was solving were on a delay that convinced me it was coincidental indeed.
