The minimum bar for usable quality can be defined precisely, and an encoding algorithm designed around it.
One obvious extreme example of this would be no compression at all, but it's easy to imagine much better designs.
For example, imagine I define a spec where I require quality no worse than a lossless 500x500x24bit/frame video stream. If we budget a bit rate higher than is required for the naive raw transmission of those frames, we can first encode the naive frames, then encode the deltas between them (upscaled to full resolution) such that the reconstruction error is minimized while not exceeding any maximum tolerated error per pixel.
With this approach, you are not crippled when facing an adversarial pattern generator of some kind, yet when transmitting regular natural scenes, you can benefit from significant quality increase.
As you suggest though, it's true that generating the most complex patterns possible will reduce any drone's video quality as much the codec's design permits -- however accomplishing this seems much more expensive for relatively little benefit versus other counter-drone approaches.