Yes, it took me a while to figure that out, since the panel will tell you you are not in PIE if you escape the PIE using the F8 key. It’s terrible.
I am still very anxious about this. For example changing scalability settings resets it back to manual value every time. Also the packaged build seems to run at different resolution then PIE build. It’s horrible situation for developer to never be certain about what resolution your game runs at and all the performance optimization issues that come with this fact.
This has been really overengineered to hell.