It didn't. Some PIO update somehow either nuked the propagation of the flash partition tables to the project, or it is ignoring them altogether and going to a very conservative default (for an ESP32) of 2MB, which I get half of normally. So what I did was I got that 16MB.csv file which specifies the standard partitions on an ESP32 with 16MB flash. Then I referenced locally within the project instead of trying to get PIO to just work with what it had, because it wasn't
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix