I had a similar, but not identical, issue … perhaps this will still help someone.
A user emailed asking why the latest 2 publications did not appear on the website.
when I navigated to the site I saw the latest 2 posts as well as all the rest just fine. However, when viewing the site in incognito I was able to see that they weren’t appearing for most people.
I double checked visibility and status and even updated the post to no avail. Finally went to the template that was synced with the front page and unticked the categories those posts belonged to, saved the template, ticked them on again and saved again. This fixed the issue for me.
