Minis are rarely racked in bulk unless you're running a server farm, which is not the use case they design for. The MacMini is first and foremost a desktop computer for non-professional people or at least not sysadmins. If people want to rack them, go ahead, but in that case how often are you hard rebooting a machine vs soft reboot anyways? Macs aren't known for freezing up too much.

Either way, it works for the use case its designed for.

Some of the rackmount kits for previous generations already reroute the power button and connectors to the front, like this https://racknex.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/with-power-bu.... (Though why not just install it backwards?) I guess they will be able to run a little lever under the M4 model the same way.

Actually, the M4 model is a little taller so it no longer fits in a 1U rack mount. Whereas before you could fit 2 horizontally in 1U, now you'd possibly fit 8 or 9 vertically in 3U. (Edit: This company says 10 per 2U https://www.racksolutions.com/m4-mac-mini-apple-hypershelf.h....)

In that case wouldn't you rather have a managed power switch / iDRAC / restart over ssh, than send someone to go press buttons in person?

(I've only ever racked things remotely, so don't know if this is common.)

Why not just rack them upside down then?

In that case then they should be on switched pdu ports and plugged into permanent kvm.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense, if you're really racking them in bulk the above is obvious.