is the fee collector account part of the ICRC-1 standard?
No, nothing about fee collection is in any ICRC standard. The meeting on Tuesday was to discuss standardizing this as part of ICRC-107.
how can a 3rd party currently check who is the fee collector of an ICRC-1 compliant ledger?
For a generic ICRC-1 compliant ledger, it is not possible - this will change with ICRC-107. For the DFINITY reference implementation, you would need to look at the ledger blocks, and look for the fee_col field. E.g., for ckETH, this is set in the first block (since it was set in the ledger initialization arguments), whereas for e.g., ckBTC, it is set in block 39_493, since the fee collector was only configured later, using a ledger upgrade argument. Subsequent blocks contain a fee_col_block which contains the block index of the block where the fee collector account is specified. Note that this implementation-specific behavior may change with ICRC-107.
I assume this is or can be a different account than the minting account.
In the DFINITY reference implementation, we explicitly forbid setting the fee collector account to the minting account (since burns are basically just transfers to the minting account, and mints transfers from the minting account).