Well the USSR, one of the greatest “empires” of all times, collapsed with barely any violence (in relative terms) and very unexpectedly. I’m not sure having access to drones could have helped that much when nobody in a position of power really wanted to preserve it.
While it’s not exactly that straightforward but democratic reforms is what basically killed it. Gorbachev allowed independent power centers to form which weren’t controlled by the party apparatus and these new centers had no reason to preserve the union/empire even though relatively few people (outside of the Baltic region and the Caucasus) actually wanted to abolish it. Internationalist empires like the USSR, Austria-Hungary, Ottomans, Tsarist Russia (outside of the core regions), Yugoslavia and even Rome to some degree tend to be very fragile. Any rapid attempt to reform the system tends to destabilize it to such a degree that it can no longer survive without extreme violence.
China and the US (still) are nation states and not real empires, therefore they are almost immune to some of the issues which brought down most historical empires (nation states are much better in enacting reforms and generally much more flexible). Of course that’s not permanent and might change in a generation or two, for instance if different US states continue drifting apart economically, culturally and socially.