I don't consider myself very good at area, but this is a weird area puzzle. It's hard to reason about min. Doing a slide & pivot seems unavoidable to break the right things (or two slides maybe, but that is worse).

Maybe you can shave one area off, but it's tricky! Access points are hard to come by. It's also surprisingly hard to shave off cycles, even though this one didn't take me very long. Fingers crossed.