I think the problem is:
Topics in Categories set to tracking only become tracked themselves when they’re clicked on.
To demonstrate, here’s my current New tab:
You can see the “Discourse Narrative Bot Beta Feedback” topic is listed, in the feature Category, which I track.
Then if I go to latest, with ?state=tracking we can’t see that topic:
And to really drive the point home, if I go back to new, with ?state=tracking I see nothing:
I think the request is for topics in Tracked categories to work like topics in Watched categories - they become Tracked as soon as the category-level notification setting is changed, so they appear in Unread as soon as posted.
I would also like to see this change, but haven’t until now (and even then I’m not sure) found the right words to clearly explain what I think is intuitive.