I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

This tracks with the earlier ~12% drone kill efficiency estimates. However drone is a mass deployment weapon. Ukraine did about 2 million frontline sorties in 2024 and aims for 5 million this year. This 1 out of 9 ratio translates into absolutely devastating damage, that artillery and airstrikes (which are also hardly "easy to use") can only dream of.

This is true, but the author also talks about cost e.g. $500 for a drone vs $100 for an artillery shell with far more effect. Surely at the point where the drone has visual on the target you can fire 5 x shells over for massively greater effect on target, and keep the drone flying for the next target, and the next.

$100 is a cost of a 60mm mortar shell. It is a hand grenade sized munition lobbed from a Pringles can sized weapon to the range of 1-2km. This is generally not the thing that comes to mind when you think of artillery strike.

A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.

A M107 155mm round weights 95lbs when launched. Assuming that is pure lead (this is false, but lead is very cheap and it gives us numbers to work with) I can buy lead ignots for $2.89/lbs. Which puts us at $293 per rounds in just materials. Since we assume the other materials cost money too, plus there is the energy used to turn ignots into a round, it seems unlikely you can get the cost to much under $1000 no matter how good your mass production is.