Pretty neat feature with way more people popping things up there than I thought - guess that means there's a lot of supporters old or new which is good. I read through this a lot more than I usually do and 1000% think this is better than holding a 'blackout' event - this is like a win-win-win imo. Supporters win, creators win, and Newgrounds probably wins from all those peeps who really want their submission bumped on the front page and either engage with the site or go out to buy supporter. Seeing this is an every tuesday thing too is neat.
My only thing isn't necessarily with the display or how large it is, but with how it feels like a big mobile-optimized element surrounded by a bunch of desktop optimized elements. Big pictures and text is great it just feels like this is a mobile list instead of a desktop-oriented experience. By no means am I dissing the feature or the work put into it, I just hope the layout gets tweaked between this week and next esp. since there's some others here that have a much more negative view than me.
Being the armchair expert I try to be, I played around in devtools a bit and think halving padding on most of the elements helps with the space. Moving the text & reactions to the right-side, adding the submission icon + rating to the same line as the title, re-sizing some text (18px for title, 14px for span) of the featured image (and re-sizing the image to be 93px tall like they are in the featured grids) also cuts down on some vertical space while giving space for submissions to have some bigger pics. The react overlay doesn't seem to break with the lesser space either which was cool and I have no clue what this would look like for multi-line featured names. I included a pic with my little edits vs what it looked like below (top is the edit with a ~30px shorter box)
If all else fails, making stuff smaller probably would help too. Just my two cents and a picture showing I'm a little bored today. Overall tho I like it and keep those cool features coming!