are you accusing me of abusing the system? 

You seemed to think there is no bump. I directly replied to that notion and argued that this bump occurs and explained why being on top of recent is coveted. So much that some developers find other ways of getting on recent. Doing it by devlogs is the approved way. Any warnings are for people reading here with similar issues as a caution and I linked to a thread explaining why doing it in non approved ways is annoying for users.

You posted in public community, not a tech support message board answered by staff. People coming in and giving their 2 cents is kinda the expected outcome. If you do not want to discuss in public, send a message to support and only that. I just came in to voice my observations. Namely that your notion of bumps is not the same as what I observed and that your account probably will not notice the effect of those bumps all too much, since you get traffic by your followers anyway after an update.

The only mods here are community message board mods. They do nothing on devlogs, indexing or approval. The only thing that the mod can do, is try to bring attention to an actual ticket you made for real Itch staff. And those devlog approvals come from Itch staff. I do not even believe they look at every devlog. Especially not currently, as they are kinda busy with other things concerning adult games.

They still do some approvals. I found some in the adult tag. But the 20 games more recent than those have a newer publishing date. I do not want to post links to adult games here. But if you want to see the bump "in action", in the top 3 of recent of the tag detective is an adult game. That has a devlog and it is sorted around 1 day ago as a time stamp, judging by neigboring games, despite being published in 2024.

Also though, like, why are you so opposed to me reporting this? I don’t get it.

Maybe because I am not? If you think there is systematic issues, tell Itch, not to public community. There is the support mail adress and there is a feedback button. Public community can only give you their experiences and opinions.

I do not know the criteria for devlog approval and I would bet money that Itch will not tell, because it would lead to people optimising their devlogs to get an approval. In my opinion the whole bump mechanic needs a major overhaul. They should put up two recent listings. One by publishing date and one by updating date (with a cooldown to prevent update spamming). Making it dependent on a devlog unfairly disadvantages people that update without making an announcement post. It also might bring up issues like your's, where you suspect you got not even into the basket they might approve, because you have not updated files.

If a game is on page 1 or page 300, if it’s got a major update, why shouldn’t it be bumped the same as any other game?

I do not understand this sentence. English is not my native language and one can not hear the tone of a voice. That's likely a cause for many misunderstandings, as I tend to be rather literal and dry at times. To my knowledge (reading threads) bumps need staff approval and that's all there is to it. Depending on staff means, it is subject to understaffing problems, holidays, crisis managment, overload and subjective rulings by persons. And of course, it means that not all devlogs are approved to cause a bump. And it also means, that like all the other internal workings of Itch, Itch will not talk about specifics.