According to the rules:
Additionally, up to 2 recent (post created in the past two weeks) featured posts from Meta Stack Exchange will appear in the community bulletins of all sites. These are also labeled "meta". Note that these will appear in addition to all of the other stuff listed above, so the list of community bulletin posts might appear longer than usual, depending on the individual site circumstances.
(emphasis on the important part)
According to this, in a very active meta, there should be 4 hot + 1 featured on MSE post, but reality hits hard in the face, as usual:
This may be related to this change. I've seen the same behavior on other SE sites, not only SO.