Here’s an example:
https://kvet.ch/post/remembering-grampa/
I have the Popular Posts active and set to Grid, and expect a post like that upon create with Promote set to grab an image from the grid of popular posts, in this case, something from Arrested Westeros ??
(If you suspect another add-on is the Root Cause, I can disable my pull quotes and footnotes for you, but I’m loathe to disable my caching and S3 media services.)