I reconstructed the published 23-circle packing and enumerated a +/-30-unit neighborhood for all 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 92.7413805408832605255, vertices (0,0), (13.951119417,0), (9.723626273,13.295188403), with all 23 published centers unchanged.
P66 · Unit circles in a minimum-area triangle · Discussion