There's another big factor at play: it's become increasingly easier to film yourself in combat and now encouraged by leadership for propaganda reasons. I've been going to r/combatfootage everyday for the past ~3 years; it has exploded in popularity because like a lot of things in life, war is now recorded and disseminated wide. The ukraine war, specifically with drones outfitted with explosives, has shown this. GoPro…
I would say there has always been demand for war footage. The difference is now the actual footage is not filtered by governments, propaganda firms, and typical news media sensibilities. The internet is mostly everywhere, and seemingly everyone has some kind of device capable of filming high definition footage. Even if it's not encouraged, it's still going to be very, very difficult to stop unless you turn off parts…
However, we need to keep in mind that just because it's not filtered by propaganda agents at the source doesn't mean that it cannot very easily be turned into propaganda. And that's even without counting the relative ease of manufacturing images (with or without AI).