Huge increase in max parts per partition after upgrade to CH 24.4.1.2088

As the title says, after upgrading to latest CH version 24.4.1.2088, from 24.3.3.102, we noticed a huge increase in CPU load on the CH cluster, and upon further investigation it seems to come from the parts merges. I've also noticed that we have a huge increase in max parts per partitions since the upgrade, please see the attached screenshot.

I could also not correlate it to any documented change in the release notes, but perhaps it's there and you could point me in the right direction for tuning something that changed between these 2 releases? We're using the ReplicatedGraphiteMergeTree engine, if it makes any difference.