It's reverse in the sense that you've been given the numerical hints, and instead of clearing the mines, you need to place them. That feels pretty "reverse" to me.
Well it is different, you can have multiple solutions in this variant. Classical minesweeper is not like that. Imagine a grid with just a 1 and the rest is empty. There are then eight different solutions. The same situation can't happen in classical, it is simply going to reveal everything except the predetermined mine.
Because of this ambiguity, the search space is much larger here. Source : I play A LOT of Minesweeper.
Thanks for the feedback would love to talk more with someone that plays a lot of minesweeper if you have the time?
Sunflowers still only ever has one valid solution across all difficulty levels, but would like to understand more why that is not clear to a veteran player
A reverse minesweeper would be: bombs are given, and you have to place the numberical hints.