At this point, having the power button not be on the bottom is a major selling point for me vs the annoying-as-hell mini.
How often are you using the power button on your Mini? What is your use case?
Maybe Apple should remove power off from the UI menus if they're claiming it uses less energy to leave it on.
(I'm dubious of that claim people are repeating here, but what the hell do I know I'm just a physicist. Reality distortion isn't my thing.)
The mini is probably less power hungry than the macbooks (less components). I have some wifi 5/ac routers that consume more power at idle (nothing connected to them) than apple laptops.
Every single day, not by choice but because it's constantly waking up in sleep mode to do maintenance task then overheating and shutting down again. Something about macOS and Bluetooth devices not playing nice.
If you never turn off your computer, it makes sense that you never use the power button. But some people do turn their computers off, and for us, it's really useful to be able to turn them on again.
Even if you can power it on using a wired keyboard though, I'm certain that you can imagine people who prefer wireless keyboards but also turn their computer off.
Put simply, more people like the aesthetic of no visible power button than like the aesthetic of daily rebooting their computer.
If I were you, and I really couldn’t let go of that, I’d put the Mac in sleep and have it scripted to restart at e.g. 6AM each day. You get the best of both worlds. Feel like you have a “fresh” Mac every morning. Let it do its updates and whatnot behind the scenes.