Is this the category layout you’re talking about? This is “Categories with Featured Topics”
In this case we more literally mean “Categories featuring latest topics for each”
Where other options like “Categories and latest topics” mean a list of categories and a separate list of latest topics (which aren’t correlated directly to categories, so it’s possible one category dominates the entire latest list)
The setup wizard makes this a little more clear with visual examples
community.example.com/wizard/steps/homepage