We may just be in an era where things swing in the direction of cheap mass armies rather than expensive elite fighting units. Think knights vs longbows. Sometimes the technology of the day favors small numbers of very expensive fighters, vehicles, and weapons. Sometimes the tech favors large numbers of cheap weapons. Cheap longbowman beat out expensive elite armored knights. Elite gun-toting marksmen and mercenaries eventually replaced the longbow armies. The mass gunpowder armies of the Napoleonic era replaced the elite mercenary armies that came before that. In the twentieth century, tanks, machine guns, and aircraft overcame masses of soldiers charging trenches with cheap rifles.

It’s not necessarily some moral failing of the nations involved. We may simply be seeing the technology evolve. Expensive aircraft that cost hundreds of millions are the modern day equivalent of knights, while cheap drones are the equivalent of the hoards of English longbowmen. An individual knight could easily defeat a single longbowman in combat. But bows were so cheap you could deploy them by the thousands. A modern fighter jet will laugh in the face of a cheap drone. But if the jet costs as much as a thousand drones put together, spamming drones becomes the winning tactic.