Next time your Mini sleeps, can you check how many watts it's using?
I did it for the last 2 hours. Did about 40 measures (with about 100 seconds pauses between them) and found the two reasons of my sleep problems.
Both reasons have caused to let the Mac mini not completely sleep: Monitors went off, external disks stopped spinning, but other devices like mouse still had power. In this state the Mac mini was still consuming almost 20 Watt constantly. Because the fan was not running the Mac mini heated itself up.
1. Power Nap
With Power Nap the sleep mode does not really work. Always when it's turned on the Mac mini wakes up itself (Screens stay off, but Mouse und unknown other devices are running and keep running).
2. External USB-C hub
This caused the same problem as Power Nap. When changing the USB-C hub (with Webcam in it) to a USB 3 hub the problem was gone.
Here's a screenshot of my measures. You can see that the problem came up when I connected the USB-C hub (but stayed after I've unplugged it when Power Nap was enabled). The problem was gone when both the USB-C hub was disconnected and Power Nap was disabled. Now in sleep the mac mini consumes less than 7 watts.
So heat problem number 1 of 3 is gone. Next problems to solve: Heat in idle and on heavy CPU load. The hopefully working solutions for these problems I've described above.
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This sounds like an elegant solution that Jony might have on a whiteboard in his lab at Apple HQ

. Seriously, this seems like an overboard solution to solve a problem that doesn't exist. The mini wouldn't have passed and received UL certs if the design submitted didn't provide sufficient cooling.
What? Did you forget the heat problem with i9 Macbook Pros (and several other Macs in the past 15 years?)
The problem with the current idle/normal work cooling at the Mac mini: The built in fan always spins at around 1700 rpm. Obviously to less to cool the Mac efficiently: Normal working tasks with watching a stream on one screen results in temperatures of more than 70°C after some hours (right now I have 60°C). That's not a big problem because it will not throttle the CPU. BUT: If you really need the CPU power, the cooler and the case can't absorb enough heat energy anymore. So the CPU heats up to 100° in a few minutes and starts throttling. If I keep the case constantly cooler it will absorb far longer before the heat can't get transferred no more to the case and the air. It works like a cache or buffer. Beside that the internal fan will always have cool air from below so it will be more efficient.
You can easily test it: Boot a cold Mac mini that was shut down for a long time: I can render in applications like Cinema 4D on all cores for about 20 minutes before the CPU gets throttled. If the mac mini is already warm (only from regular worklng without heavy CPU load) it starts throttling in 1-5 minutes.
Beside that: It's fun to build solutions that improve a computer.

And my fan hole will be beautiful, white sprayed, with round corners (even though it's invisible).

I will call it the glory hole.