Very interesting but risky (easy to discover and renders the whole operation ineffective). So I believe what they did was heavy-handed but the most reasonable.

One funny tick that's supposedly appeared is installing viruses on the SD cards used in drones so if/when a drone is downed intact and picked up by a curious enemy, their computer is infected.

Yeh, it would seem in some ways more useful than shutting down the factory; if you gently made all the drones do something, like let them be remote controlled, or bomb the place they were launched from.

But once that happened a handful of times it would be corrected.

I suppose it could be used sparingly but Ukraine would have no way of knowing when to use it. Perhaps a Bluetooth or whatever else the drone has on board "keep away" beacon for vips.

You say that, but Israel booby trapped the Hezbollah comm devices _twice_ with physical explosives.

There are tones of non-obvious options. Eg make it appear like being shoot-downs. With a bunch of RNG / logic to make it non-obvious... random percentage, only when getting close to target, so many ways...

The real enemy is QA. Don't want it misbehaving during a virtual test flight.

Drones are typically flashed minutes before the mission.