You can get much better detail from drones if the drone happens to be pointing at what you're interested at in a time frame you're interested in. And, as you po

You can get much better detail from drones if the drone happens to be pointing at what you're interested at in a time frame you're interested in. And, as you point out, if they can get the GB of data back. China has access to better Earth Observation resources than Google Maps anyway, so a collection of EO imagery from tasked satellites of different types up to 0.25m pixels of something they actually want to monitor when they want to monitor it is a lot more useful than even higher resolution image collections of some random farm at random times. The latter wouldn't be entirely useless for intelligence purposes if the backdoor exists, but neither is Googling for images of locations voluntarily uploaded to the public web by smartphone users...