The date of special publication from and to will not be saved if you do not have special enabled for the article
What needs to be fixed
If I fill in the fields for Start Featured and Finish Featured in an article when publishing and I save the article, they will be cleared again if you do not have the Featured box set to yes in the content tab.
Why this should be fixed
Could it be possible that you fill in all these fields but you have not yet made the article Featured? A message will appear, where you can also indicate that you still want to put the article on Featured.
I had to find out why the values were not saved.
How would you fix it
Side Effects expected
This has been translated from Dutch using Google Translate.
Hope we can find a solution.
Duplicate https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/issues/43467
Closing as duplicate.