I think most of us knew this already, didn't we? I mean, if it's true that there are only a handful of curators operate on a daily basis, of course not every single article will be looked at.

That's up to them how they select the writers and whose stuff will be looked at. Of course, there are favorites and golden children.

Also, the algorithm does a lot of dirty work, I think. Let's say you had a link to Amazon or a streaming platform, which is not an affiliate link in many cases, but the algorithm detects it as one. Boom, you're disqualified. Although, this usually happens in a day or so.