Back in the 80's and 90's part of the sales pitch for drones was that they didn't need to have the super flight safety required for manned aviation. Less redundancy and less costs of testing were supposed to be major advantages of drones.
The focus on being able to use tiny spotter drones and extremely long endurance drones (with Global Hawk as gold-plated example or giant proportions) is only about a decade old. Previously, drones were widely understood to be expendable, and I think we still understand the tiny ones are indeed still expendable.