I won't say bias. Just that people are a bit lazy. No one wants to dig around to find quality newbie posters. Whereas, hero/legendary members with a ton of green trust, shine among commoners. Also, many newbies post in altcoin/bounty/non-crypto sections where the chances of getting merits are even lower. I don't wanna say it, but a newbie has more chances of getting merits in meta section vs. other sections. Plus merit donors expect exceptionally high quality posts from newbies as they don't want to help rank up spammers or sometimes clever copy-paste posters. I personally prefer to give merits to lower ranked quality posters.
I wouldn't say that Meta is a good place for a newbie to get merits, particularly now that the pity wave of merits after the 1 merit requirement introduction has subsided. Check out
DdmrDdmr's thread on where users tend to get their first merits.
The best place for a newbie to be noticed is where they can genuinely contribute. A real newbie (not someone's alt) is unlikely to bring up anything useful in Meta.
Exactly. There is a confusion about this. Many newbies who receive merits in Meta write in a way that makes it clear they already know the forum. These people can not be considered newbies.
If you are a newbie looking for merits, do not waste time on the Meta section.
If you are really a newbie, it will be difficult to receive merits. That's why you need only 1. It would even be interesting to have a statistic about this. But I imagine that a bounty hunter who knows little about Bitcoin and only wants to participate in airdrops or send messages as a spamer, will need about 30 messages of reasonable quality to receive 1 merits.
The interesting fact is that to write these 30 messages you will need to study, read and search. So the next step that will be the required amount of merits to become a Member will work in a more fluid and natural way.
And if you are a newbie trying hard to start a thread for merits then you will end up getting a lot of negative reply.
Now, the OP's initial question is correct. There is a bias. If the newbie or low ranking is struggling to earn a merit just to participate in more bounties, people will avoid sending that merit. And most of the examples of newbies receiving tons of merits in this topic demonstrate this. They are people who post on technical subjects. Texts of great quality, relevance and that are useful to all. They are not in search of merits. They are searching for great debates about a subject that they love which is cryptocurrencies.