I think it is quite complex. You have the status of the topic, the status of the category, and the statuses of the tags. The expectations of which status will overrule which can be quite different.
On the one hand, the current behavior is helpful. For example, if I didn’t want to see Developer Guides when browsing documentation topics because I’m not a developer and they don’t matter to me. My preference does not change when I’m looking for documentation about data-explorer. I still don’t want topics for developers.
On the other hand, there are also use cases where the opposite would be more helpful, like in Is it possible to override a muted category with a certain tag?