Probably more reliable to maintain, too. A single drone or even a substantial minority failing only lowers swarm throughput rather than completely taking the whole thing out of commission.
I say that as someone who worked with drones. They are, honestly, a pain.
I kept looking at the many consumer drone startups that kept popping up and promising various abilities, but they were, almost all of them, lacking. Videography and photogrammetry are the few fields where they took off, and that is because there you have a trained individual controlling the drone. I find it hard to find any startups or products where drones with high autonomy are being successful.
Am open to being proved wrong though, I'm always excited to see development in this field.