In 2022, what actually happens to a candidate question for the HNQ when MathJax is in the title? (e.g. edit changing n=25 to "$n=25$")

Question

For my recently asked Physics SE question How can an $n=25$ Rydberg state exist in a solid? What does the wave function look like? an edit was made changing n=25 to "$n=25$". Presumably this was seen as a necessary improvement and not just a trivial edit.

I know there has been some issues in the past with regard to MathJax in question titles and rendering issues in the HNQ sidebar, but I can not figure out the exact status of this situation in 2022.

I was under the impression that inserting MathJax into a question's title could interfere with the question getting to, and remaining in the HNQ, perhaps by design or perhaps through someone removing it for aesthetic reasons (e.g. bad rendering) but I can not find out the exact state of the situation now in 2022. So I'd like to ask:

Question: In 2022, what actually happens to a candidate question for the HNQ when MathJax is in the title? (e.g. edit changing n=25 to "$n=25$")

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So far I've found the following comments:

March 12, 2019:

...the formula picks a set of questions, which we then narrow down - throw away questions picked > 3 days ago, remove questions with MathJax in titles and questions that aren't in English, then trim per-site options down to 5 hottest, and grab top 100 for HNQ out of that. Note that the list is cached (and, under normal circumstances) recalculated every 15 minutes. Any given question isn't guaranteed to spend 72 hours in the list...

March 21, 2019:

So in other words, anyone with edit permissions is able to unilaterally knock questions off of HNQ on any site that supports MathJax? That's a little silly.

Answer 1

It would be good to have a staff member answering this, but I can provide some observational evidence that the rule is still in place, with the help of the Stack Exchange Data Explorer. The Hot Network Questions list is refreshed every 3 minutes, so we can check title edits which happen less than three minutes before a question becoming a Hot Network Question with this SEDE query.

When you run it on a couple of math-oriented sites, you see that some questions which were long eligible for HNQ already, only became so after the title edit. Here are some results:

• Is the following generalization of Cauchy-Schwarz inequality true? (20.71 hours after posting)
• When is a compact orbifold Riemann surface a global quotient of a Riemann surface (13.43 hours after posting)
• Why is the one quadratic polynomial a perfect square more often than the other? (9.73 hours after posting)
• Why is stress defined in the way as it is? (9.54 hours after posting)
• Determines if the minimum spanning tree only uses edges with an integer weight, when E, V are in O(n) (8.71 hours after posting)

Almost all questions which become HNQ do shortly after 8 hours, so this is definitely evidence that the "no MathJax in HNQ" rule is still in place.