When I start a hidden article, every page view of myself is counted, but once I publish the article $record->record_views doesn’t change anymore. Is this intentional? Is it updated later?

I deliberately don’t have any caching activated for this. 

Views are updated in the background via a task. Are they not updating at all or just taking a while to update?

Thanks for the pointer. I followed the lead and found an outdated cron key. 

Excellent! Glad to hear you were able to resolve your issue 🙂