Numbers from MQTT not recognized

I have a strange issue here. I have two similar sensors like so:

mqtt:
- sensor:
      - name: "Solar Pumpe RPM"
        unique_id: solar_pumpe_rpm
        unit_of_measurement: "RPM"
        state_topic: "ebusd/solar/RPM"
        value_template: "{{value_json}}"
- sensor:
      - name: "Gas y-value"
        unique_id: gas_yval
        state_topic: "gas/yval"
        value_template: "{{value_json}}"

While the RPM is showing fine as a graph, the yval is displayed like this:

The good one is sent from s python code while the bad one comes from C++ code (PubSubClient::publish)

The C++ stuff (I don’t really like that “language”) does not seem to offer another way to send an integer. So any way to deal with that? I already tried
value_template: "{{float(value_json)}}" but to no avail.

The gas has no unit_of_measurement, so no graph

Actually it’s just an abstract number, but giving it “n” solved the issue.