I think researching this stuff today is pretty immoral. If you're creating shit like this, you're inventing the next land mine. Stop it.
Anyone who eschews development of such military system risks becoming a toy of those who went all in.
The Armenians just lost a lot of territory in Nagorno Karabakh they considered their own - to an enemy who had suicide drones. Their country wasn't exactly big even before that loss.
Fifty other nations in potentially similar position looked at that war and its outcome. I doubt that their decisions were "let us stay moral and possibly be next on the chopping block".
IMHO while it's true their enemy had 'suicide drones' (which are actually loitering munitions, but 'suicide' makes it sound so much more evil) that wasn't a deciding factor - they also had Turkish drones that didn't require self detonation to work.
Azerbaijan put a lot of videos on youtube showing them bombing and pursuing groups of Armenian soldiers with those drones, not the suicide drones. The suicide drones were anti material weapons against mobile air defense and other harder targets.
The azeris even used old (trash) AN-2's turned into drones to get a response from Armenian air defense systems so that loitering munitions like the herop could identity air defense systems with minimal danger.
We are already in this race. Everyone is, even if they won't acknowledge it. Without anti air/anti drone technology no ground force is safe. This isn't new or unique to drones - it's the truth of every war where air dominance occurs.
In the Six Day War Israel destroyed most of Egypt's air force on the ground in its opening strike, and when Egypt tried to retreat from the Sinai they used their air force to bomb the retreating units with impunity. The remnants of Egypt's air force couldn't fight against an intact air force so they flew support sorties but were overall ineffective. No drones required. It's just gotten cheaper to do.
If the Meanie Republic uses Agony Clouds against the citizens of Goodistan, the rest of the world notices. Maybe the Meanie Republic completely wins and even annexes Goodistan, but the bystander countries are going to take Meanie atrocities into account when deciding how to interact with that state.
Relatedly, a year ago "Why don't we use chemical weapons anymore" was trending on HN (it's a good read): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22661465
So the moral outrage is likely to be absent, at least compared to things like flattening of Rotterdam by Luftwaffe or Rape of Nanking.
The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if your enemy (or your friends, or civilians, or large dogs, or cattle) enter the minefield, they're going to die or at least be mutilated.
Obviously, some of that is disadvantage. The biggest disadvantage is that they're cheap, and buried in the ground, so it's tempting to leave them there, especially if you happen to lose the conflict. So they continue to kill people long after there are no enemies left.
Automated gunbots have the same advantage as landmines. They share a shade of the minor disadvantage, namely they can't reliably tell enemies from friendlies or civilians. But neither can a grunt in a machine gun emplacement.
They are expensive, and above the ground, so there's no world in which civilian children, years after the conflict, are shot to death while playing in a field.
So if these are the "next landmine" I say: good. We would all love to live in the world in which there is no war, but, we don't. Until we do, we will need the weapons of war.
It's still immoral.
In a vacuum, with perfectly spherical frictionless humans, sure.
In the world we live in, a technology which replaces landmines, and kills fewer noncombatants, is an improvement which results in less civilian death. That's moral in my playbook.
"War is symmetric" is a fallacy. You often can't shoot back at who is shooting at you, but you can shoot at others.