I found a little tricky to reproduce this properly with the Featured Homepage component, it mixes in too many other conditions.
I can easily reproduce with a stripped down component though. I pushed this into a sample repo here: GitHub - pmusaraj/discourse-sample-custom-homepage
The sample-list component there should pull in only topics with the featured tag, but it doesn’t (it pulls in the first 3 topics for me). If I remove the custom_homepage modifier from that theme’s about.json file, then the right topics are pulled in.
I’ll find someone more familiar with the store service to have a look. Thanks!