A new PNG spec

Until everything new is "optional". Hopefully PNG won't be the target of "enshitification". We all know that for file formats, there is a very strong pressure from developers and vendors for that to happen since it favors, hard, vendor and developer lock-in. If not careful, even with a team of PHD devs won't be able to write alternatives encoders/decoders that "reasonbly" and the world will end-up with very few alternatives implementations, if not only one.

I did skim through the specs, it seems most of it is related to cleanup and optional blocks, so it seems PNG is still safe, am I wrong? (asking those who did dive into the new specs deeply).

Everything new is optional. This is not a breaking change. Old PNGs and software continue to work just fine. And these new changes are backwards-compatible as much as they can be. So old software can display a new PNG and be mostly correct. By that I mean, the user will still say "it is a picture of a red apple". But if the software isn't HDR, they might not get the bright highlights and inky blacks of the HDR PNG.

What is the remaining pertinent value of HDR since we are moving towards xrgb16161616 pixel format?