Agreed, this is on our list for improvements! I’ll add that to the OP for clarity.
Ah, I believe this is because you’re in the new-new-testers group, which is demoing an experimental change to how we display new and unread topics. I can add this to our list to patch up but since this is not available outside of the group’s members on Meta (to my knowledge), I’m not sure how quickly we’ll get to it.