Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.

They have to disclose that Ai was used. So you should be able to filter them out. At least in theory. This should be a general setting in https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/ . Maybe you could exclude some titles by tags, but I would be careful to not exclude normal and good games by accident. Maybe there is a Steam Curator for this job (does anyone else use the Steam Curators?).

As for the Next Fest itself, my internet is extremely bad since 2 months. I have no clue what's on it right now... :-(

That’s usually how it is at the start, there’s no real sorting the first few days. By Thursday and Friday the slop should start to fall off

So much ai shit. It sucks

I've found some good stuff (Bus Bound, Bubsy 4D), but none of it through the actual Steam Next Fest store page. That indeed seems to be overloaded with low-effort crap.