Quite a presentation, I don't think I will work through that.
The amount of digital material flowing out of war zones through various by many entities is indeed vast and varied. Without getting into the technical aspects it is in my opinion key to look at the big picture. Lets take first into account the following global trends:
1) An ever increasing amount of objects able to capture various data*
2) An increasingly wide and deep capability of long-range communication
3) An ever increasing importance of social media and data sharing
Even if it a simplistic take those overall trends will provide a increasing detailed, rich and robust base for OSINT. There is no doubt that parties will try to opress and counteract when it isn't in their interest but this can only achieved partly. Interestingly propaganda videos and dispatches have in many occasions revealed informations which backfired or harmed the producer's cause.
It is clear that not only media but various services, likely led by the US, have long started to make use of the recent waves of OSINT. The US has of course the advantage that the data of the most important software companies is on home soil and that it is present in different forms almost worldwide. The Ukrainians have been clearly saving lots of stuff coming over the social media so that the deleting stuff wasn't quite successful. Some cases in the Donbas like the famous seperatist Buk with three missile moving east have also shown that it is difficult to understand from the outside where to draw the line between OSINT and 'normal' covert observation. Was it filmed by a civilian, agent or infiltrated soldier? If it was the former was it first posted on YT or sent to a Ukrainian civil group or directly to the government?
Lots of question but there is little doubt that we will see the importance of OSINT growing.
*Smartphones, CCTV, dash-board cameras, and normal ones have been used to cite a few.
Bookmarks