It's not unrelated, it's the same issue the r/science mods reference. A short time ago, reddit switching the default homepage to sort by "best", where it used to sort by "hot". While "best" sounds great, it actually results in some terrible behavior such as often pushing up items you really aren't interested in, while hiding very popular posts. The only fix right now is to change your bookmark to point to https://www.reddit.com/hot/