This mechanics was never intended and it was actually kind of a bug and using it feels like a weird trick. There are other ways to get compressed belts (splitters for example) that should still work properly. I'm aware that this possibly breaks some setups relying on the functionality, but we could...

I exclusively registered on the forums to report this as well. For me this change may not be game breaking but heart breaking. It completely makes the game not fun for me, which saddens me a lot. Have developers ever considered making inserters automatically compress belts? I don't see any reason fo...