Any way to exclude Templates folder from Highlighted Content Web Part?

SvenSieverding - I played around with that JSON formatting, and it's way beyond me. That example didn't work as is (I know parts of it are looking for specific fields, but I didn't even get any thumbnail images in my grid, and got completely lost trying to figure that out).

I decided to try doing a calculated field to look for a specific tag in the page title, which was easy to do - but HCWP doesn't show the calculated field as a "page attribute" for filtering, only title and a couple of choice fields I set up as page metadata. Sigh.

So I came up with another solution - using a CAML query with "Scope='FilesOnly'" on the <View> tag. CAML doesn't traverse folders by default, and this keeps the "Templates" folder itself from showing up in the results.

It works, but I'm not a fan of needing to build CAML queries for what should be simple stuff. Makes page maintenance and reuse far more hassle than it should be.