Follow-up - my Mini 5 finally gave it up. I’m not exactly gentle with it, and the screen started going fluky with colors, then sporadically not responding to touch, and the battery life kept dwindling, and it eventually just stopped working. So I grabbed a new Mini 6.
Probably took about an hour from unboxing to installing a big update to restoring from my iCloud backup to picking right up where the old one left off. Gotta love that backup - everything restored exactly as I had left it, including purchased software and logged-in games that remained logged in.
As for the device itself, I’m very happy with it so far. No sign whatsoever of the ‘jelly scroll’ from its first release, and I use this almost exclusively in landscape mode. Screen is bright and clear, and it could be my imagination, but text looks sharper, too. Of course I got it just in time for the rumored Mini 7 to be dropping, but I got this one for a decent price, so I don’t care. Overall, no issues or complaints - it’s a very nice compact tablet.