did something happen in the last few weeks to minimotes?
Yes. They changed the stock device type handler and introduced a glitch. Supposedly it’s being worked on and may be fixed in some versions.
One community member who just bought one has been having trouble getting it to work and started a thread on that, but when I referred him to the other thread on problems introduced by these new changes, he felt it wasn’t related to what he was seeing. Still you might want to take a look at his thread.
And in the following thread you can see the discussion, including some comments from SmartThings staff members, about another Aeotec device. And that one has the same error message that you were seeing.
So report it to support and ask them to check with @jackchi in engineering if they seem unaware of the device type handler changes.