Since you’re setting them as featured when editing the post, I would also include support for “Page Attributes” in the setting for the CPT and then set the order using the built in order field. Then I’d use this field for to order the posts in the query that gets the featured posts
//.....
'orderby' => array('menu_order' => 'ASC');
//.....
or
//.....
'orderby' => 'menu_order',
'order' => 'ASC'
//.....
depending on how you write your WP_Query args
