Having worked on inflight connectivity apps and Earth Observation respectively, for a couple of startups I'm inclined to agree overall. Workarounds would be:

[i] ground sync, which would be fine for a lot of use cases where higher revisit rate and sometimes less cloud cover is sufficient to make the imagery valuable, and open up non-wifi flights. Ground sync can be over regular 4G or even swapping flash drives [some W-IFE boxes update this way, though infrequently].

[ii] Getting dedicated bandwidth from the satellite/a2g internet provider, who can potentially allow you a lot more than is made available to an individual consumer, but obviously at a hefty charge.

[iii] using streaming codecs designed for low kbps rates - though this is obviously lossy, and pixel perfection matters for a lot of EO use cases.

Yes and no. Connectivity tests have been an important part of the early work so far but depending on the airline and route, we've consistently averaged 6Mbps upload pre-Covid which has been sufficient. Passenger volume is significantly down post-Covid and that upload number has been about 3x lately. Wifi coverage is ~100% over land and the North Atlantic, so reliability of service is a negligible issue. American Airlines has recently upgraded their in-flight wifi to Gogo's 2Ku systems and we've hit 15Mbps up on those flights, but as another commenter mentioned, the plan is to carve out dedicated bandwidth onboard the flight for better connectivity. A connection is only optional, as we save the recorded data and can upload once the flight lands using wifi on the ground (much cheaper, but with a few hours of latency between recording and becoming a map tile).