Car Reinforcement Learning is indexed. Exchange Ventures: Profit Pursuit was published half a day ago. There's no bug, please wait.

From my observation there are three queues.

One "queue" that isn't. Games just go on index after black box magic inspection. Most games go there. If it is a queue, it is not noticeable and waiting time is measured in minutes.

A second queue where, for whatever reason, games are put for manual inspection. Reasons are mostly unknown, maybe even random. It is often said, that activating payments for the first time will put you there. Itch will not say what puts you into this queue, probably to avoid people trying to game the system.

A third queue where things get put for "real" reasons. They often are quarantined and might have been indexed for a short time. Maybe a false or true positive on a malware scanner. Maybe the game got reported. Maybe a combination of things triggered a high confidence that it could be spam or does not meet the quality guidelines.

Second and third queue might be the same queue in terms of waiting time. Or maybe not. In any case, you have to wait. Maybe there are parallel queues for different staff that specialise in different types of games. Which certainly would explain why the waiting time seems largly random. If waiting time is too long, a nudge might help. And too long seems to be anywhere between two and four weeks. 30 days was normal around winter holidays, iirc.

Anyways, you will be on page 1 of most recent maybe an hour or two. And to be blunt, if you have 5 views on your game or 11, what's the difference? You should have fun making it and if it is a thing to promote, existing on itch is not sufficient for that. The chance for your target audience seeing you in that blink of second you rush past on most recent is moot.

If existing on itch is all you do as promotion, using relevant tags is far more important. And making your game's description match the game and be relevant to what you promise. Also, keep your promises. You will get traffic from outside by search engines - if you do have some sort of target audience and not the 73463th clone of bland tutorial game.