The recommendation API provides high quality suggestions, a more basic fallback approach (showing featured articles that are missing in he target wiki) should be used when there are no suggestions from the main API, or when there are not enough to fill the list of suggestions.

Recent issues in the recommendation API resulted in the suggestions list to be empty. We need to check properly if there are recommendations and handle errors if API is down.

We want also to avoid visual glitches of suggestions appearing and disappearing, but that is handles in a separated ticket (T173985).