I think that level of transparency is the new norm. Everybody has mobile phones and you can have a new satelite imaginery every few hours. It's pretty difficult to hide a jet loss, unless it happens at sea.

Satellite imagery doesn't go to (or is paid by via some crowdsourcing) public. Maybe 90% of the videos ie on r/CombatFootage are from drones, maybe even basic DJI ones but operated by military.

Its a voluntary decision of those in command to share these, from both sides, nothing less and nothing more, to continuous amazement of both civilian and military communities watching those (some stuff I saw I'd never say is possible or would happen, no need to go to details some of it is beyond brutal).

You are maybe mixing Syria war footage - there are tons of them from around 2016, done as you say via phones or maybe some cheap gopros or consumer cameras of that time. That's not a typical Ukraine war footage.

Even Ukraine is less transparent than popularly believed. Probably less than half of drone strikes are recorded, and the Ukrainian government is effective at keeping some areas blacked out. For example, the Kursk offensive didn't have any public drone footage until after it had stablized. Situations like the current India-Pakistan strikes are particularly difficult, as the OSINT analysts don't have established sources and procedures yet, plus the sources are heavily biased. Ukrainian footage is very biased as well, which doesn't come up frequently in popular discussions. But most people in the West are more inclined to believe Ukrainian reports (which is helped by Ukraine's past general trustworthiness and Russia's untrustworthiness; it's not totally misplaced), but are more likely to give more even weight to reports on both sides of India-Pakistan, which will inevitably be contradictory.

Plane shootdowns are particularly difficult. People have a very limited view of the airspace, and even if a plane is hit by a missile and explodes a couple seconds later, those couple seconds can take the plane out of view. Typical tactics include flying low, popping up for a better view, and delivering weapons as they dive again. The pop up is the most vulnerable part, and where they're most likely to be hit. If someone on the ground hears a jet fly over, looks for it, finds it, sees a missile explode near it, and watches it head towards the ground, they're likely to assume it's been hit and is going down, but it's equally likely that it wasn't hit and is simply returning to a low and safe altitude. Combine this with night or weather and the fact that many of these fights take place in rural areas instead of over cities, and it's very easy for civilians on both sides to claim more kills than were even planes in the air. Even militaries aren't immune from this. They get reports from pilots, who are notorious overreporters of kills. In addition to all the factors people on the ground have also have the fact that theyore being shot at and usually can't actually watch a target hit the ground. Air defense units have the same factors, plus it's not always clear who exactly shot a target down. Both your unit and the one a couple miles away on the other side of the city fired a missile, and both saw the plane go down out of view, and both are likely to claim a kill. Military intelligence should be able to correlate these reports and take into account these known biases but that takes time, and an uncareful spokesperson wanting to get a positive report out to the public may give out unverified reports to the press.

Battlefields are more transparent than ever, but the fog of war hasn't been completely blown away