Completely agree. In the entire history of iOS/iPadOS devices, Apple has never made the short edge of the screen narrower in terms of resolution. Every single iPhone and iPod touch has always had a minimum width of 320 points. For iPads, this was 768 points.
768 minus 744 is only 24 points which I believe is around 1/8 inch physical size. Clearly they could have made the new mini at tad less tall and a tad wider; i.e. preserve the 768 width. It could still have slightly more than 1024 points in its height.
For one of my apps, this will be a trivial fix to change content of some very large buttons. It uses autolayout, but I assumed a minimum short edge of 768.
For a game app though, 768 was such a nice number. I needed at least 8 game pieces across, so each piece was rendered at 96 point. I believe Apple's fix is to now letterbox apps (if set to run full screen) which will then render images at 96.875%. Hopefully not too many drawing artifacts show up for folks due to this.
