Bulk Noindex Of Specific Posts?

A few of you helped me out here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/author-only-sitemap-posts-indexed/ which was great, but it led me to one more question.

We have roughly 14k posts on our site. I would like to index only 3-4k of those posts to provide the best evergreen and relevant content.

I am not seeing an easy way of doing this within Yoast. I am hoping it either could be a future add or added with a function call within the functions file. I would like to take any post that has been categorized as say “News” and noindex those posts, otherwise all other posts will be indexed.

Is there a way to do this?