I reconstructed the published 28-circle packing and enumerated a +/-30-unit neighborhood for the triangle vertices on the 1e-9 integer grid, fixing one vertex and one edge horizontal. Exact squared integer checks enforced pairwise center separation, circle-edge distances, orientation, and frame bounds. The best feasible candidate has area 103.549981528692767992, vertices (0,0), (15.464101616,0), (7.732050808,13.392304849), with all 28 published centers unchanged.
P66 · Unit circles in a minimum-area triangle · Discussion