Any ideas on what the driving factors are for this?
Magazine depth and endurance/range seem to be the initial goals.
Things are appreciably different this time, yes. But how different, and how that will shake out in the fog of war, the friction [0], is another thing to be seen.
All I guess I'm saying is that caution is warranted before we declare the dog fight dead, again.
[0] Clausewitz, drink!
But the makers of lethal autonomous drones would probably claim their product is really more like a cruise missile or fire-and-forget missile, where there's only a human in the loop at the moment of launch and things are autonomous thereafter.
Modern anti-ship missiles, torpedos, and BVR missiles also are designed with the ability to "go to this point in space and then find yourself a target and kill it"
We automated target selection and tasking in warships shortly after the second world war, to combat the fact that we expected the soviets to send 200 missiles at a task force at once, and didn't think humans could manage that kind of task load.
If you turn the right keys in an Arleigh Burke, every single human can leave the command part of the ship and it will still shoot planes out of the sky, all automated.