I don’t know why (I do nothing special today), today hot_exit stopped to work for me. When exit and start again ST, every time I see only one empty 2-column page.
Setting still looks ok:
"hot_exit": true,
"remember_open_files": true,
"open_files_in_new_window": true,
"create_window_at_startup": false,
"close_windows_when_empty": false,