My last post was just saying that it was fixed and describing what had happened and what fixed it:

We optimized the customization and it fixed.

Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Thanks! This was a really weird one. It ended up being caused by a bizarre hosting limitation once the number of total posts reached a certain point and a customization was running wp_query on all posts. We optimized the customization and it fixed. But there were no hints of the issue and the images that were getting not-loaded (note they weren’t missing, just unloaded) by Newspaper were random (different slots as new posts cycled through the home page).

If ANY file in a theme is not overridable by a child theme file then it does NOT support Child themes in the true sense of the WP definition and cannot be advertised as such. Naturally, our strong recommendation would be to adhere to standard WP Child Theme standards and ensure that ALL files which render output are able to be overridden by child theme files.

In the practical sense… if you dont do this, then we will forever be stuck on making sure we carry over our customizations to those files at the parent level so that they survive any theme updates even if we’re making most of the customizations in the child and this isn’t marketed correctly.