The word conjures the military, but most drones are toys, cameras, and crop-dusters. The mix says more about the technology than the headlines do.
Say "drone" and most people picture a military strike. Count the actual units coming off production lines and the picture inverts: the overwhelming majority are consumer quadcopters, followed by commercial rigs for inspection and mapping, and agricultural sprayers. Military hardware is the smallest category by volume, even if it dominates the news and the budgets.
That gap between perception and production is the story. The technology became cheap and general-purpose, and cheap general-purpose things get made by the millions.
The drone age already arrived, it just looks like a camera on a gimbal, not a headline. The volume is consumer; the attention is military; the two rarely match.