When a listing has drone footage, am I learning anything or just watching a commercial?

The second half of your post answered the first half for me. What the camera avoids is information too, once you start watching for it. I'd still call it marketing and go look.

Rural buyer here and aerial is the single most useful thing in a rural listing. Road frontage, tree line, where water sits after rain, whether the neighbor runs cattle right up to the fence. On a 40 acre parcel the ground photos tell you about a house nobody is buying. But bramble, the aerial still doesn't tell you the access is recorded. I've seen a beautiful flyover of a driveway that turned out to be a handshake with a neighbor and nothing on paper, and confirming that is a title question for a professional in that state.

How do you even tell what direction the camera is facing in one of these? I watch them and I have no orientation at all, everything is just trees from above.

Ember, cross it against satellite view on any mapping site. Find the roof shape in both, then you know which way each pass is going and which side got skipped. Takes two minutes and it's how I caught that a listing's "wooded rear" was wooded because a retention pond sat behind it. The aerial was gorgeous and told the truth if you knew where to look.

I pay for aerial on my own listings, so I'll say the ugly part. I direct it. I tell the pilot which side of the house I want and which pass to leave out, and he does it because he's shooting for the seller. A good pilot will tell you honestly that a shot doesn't work, and he'll still fly the ones I ask for. Weight it accordingly.

Flint saying that out loud is worth more than the poll. If aerial is directed by the seller, then a listing with no aerial on an acreage property is the louder signal. Somebody decided the overhead view wasn't helping.

I use it to decide whether to spend the four hours driving, and that's all. It's a screening filter that cuts my wasted trips, and I've never let one substitute for standing on the dirt. Cheap for what it does at that job, useless for the job of being certain about anything.