> Because compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, reducing network and battery usage
> Instead of filling the stream and having a constant stream size, you could just code the drone do add random bursts of data
You cannot simultaneously reduce network bandwidth and also increase it. Of course padding with noise increases bandwidth, but it's silly to do that when you could instead be padding it with more bits relevant to the video stream.
The vulnerability here isn't inherent to video compression; it's that the compression rate (and therefore network packet rate) is variable (so as to minimize global size of a video stream). It would not be that difficult to modify an encoder to guarantee fixed bit rate over whatever time chunk you want (depending on how many frames is tolerable to buffer before sending out), then send out those chunks at regular intervals.