I used to work for an imaging satellite company. And yes - spy satellites are crazy powerful. The real problem is one of bandwidth. Crazy powerful spy satellites are expensive - and there aren't a lot of them.

So everybody is competing for time on them. Satellite images have been traditionally expensive and rare. We web intelligence agencies have to take turns and sometimes miss important events due to scheduling or timing conflicts.

The thing these new satellites offer is broad coverage. When you have a few hundred small-sats there's just many, many more opportunities to have eyes on the part of the world you're interested in.

All that said, you want to pay attention to the resolution of the images. The place I worked for was providing imagery about 1-meter resolution. E.g. each pixel in the image corresponded to about 1sq-meter of earth. We figured this was a good compromise between image quality and privacy. Enough to count cars, see weather patterns, make out groups of people, but identifying any given person was right out.

So if you see an imaging company throwing a bazillion imaging small-sats up - its worth checking what their reported resolution is. 0.5m means a real tall dude would still only be 2 pixels. But 1cm resolution means you could count their teeth.

Yes. The real difference is that the newer tech is cheap and fast enough to be useful in real time to general industry and local/state government, not just spooks.