Yeah, just checked. At least one boosted story on my pub that doesn't have any of those topic tags. I think it always makes sense to have one 'umbrella' tag like 'food', 'travel', 'culture', 'technology', but as I say, that was not stated to me in onboarding as a deal-breaker for boosting, and I can confirm that at least one piece I have nominated and had boosted does not meet this requirement.

If you think about it, it would be hugely difficult to enforce.

Curators couldn't memorise that list, so they would need to have an automated process that, when a nomination is received by Curation, checks its 5 tags, cross-checks against a constantly updated list of categories - which can be added or removed (e.g. 'Covid-19' under 'Health' clearly didn't exist in 2018) - and then flags that up to the Curator, with a message 'You must reject this story - we don't think it's tags are quite right.'.

This is neither plausible from a technical perspective - Medium still handles a lot of this stuff in manually updated spreadsheets - nor does it make sense from an editorial standpoint.

I seriously think someone's got their wires crossed here.

But like I say, picking one of the biggies somewhere in the mix just makes common sense to me.