mines are what you're looking for in terms of hard to detect ground level AT weapons, and there's faster, better ways to rapidly deploy them

The ideal use case of these seems to be precisely as mines - I would agree that the article's presented scenario of a bunch of these swarming the enemy is maybe a tad silly (although I also feel that you're somewhat overestimating the ability of vehicle crews to actually spot these and effectively fire at them - visibility from within a vehicle being dogshit has been a problem since the very invention of mechanized forces as a concept, unless you go back to ye olde open-topped halftracks I find the chances of the gunner and commander actually managing to spot small targets so close by out of their optics to be pretty dubious - I mean, the Israelis literally had guys sneak up on their vehicles and plant bombs , vehicle optics are optimized for spotting enemy tanks far away, not this kind of stuff)

But something else you could do is just have them lay in wait for a vehicle to pass by (which has, in fact, already been developed as a tactic for flying drones, wherein they sit parked beside a road and only fly up when their operator spots a target passing by - and a ground-based drone could carry a rather bigger payload). Minefields can be deployed rapidly with modern remote minelaying systems, but they're still static - you deploy them once and that's it (and then you might find yourself having to invest a whole bunch of effort undeploying them if you ever need to then counterattack along the land you just mined after the minefield does its job of blunting the enemy's offensive). Moveable mines could provide a greater degree of flexibility.

Now, this coming from the US MIC does mean that there is pretty inevitably going to be an element of grift, but not necessarily in the "this is a completely unworkable concept" sense - most MIC grifting isn't that, it's just charging too much money and producing things too slowly. Many of the various American long-range missiles and interceptors are perfectly fine as designs - they're just too expensive for what they provide.

Hell March riff intensifies

Me, i'm holding out for the Ion Cannon

Flying drones do have counters against them - jamming (and while fiber optics solve that, they have their own drawbacks, like reduced range), being intercepted while in flight, and being stopped from detonating on important parts of the vehicle by additional armor. Plus, as insurgentrat said, there's payload limits, it's a lot easier to drive weight around than it is to keep it floating up in the sky, so in practice, the stereotypical really cheap FPV drones tend to have pretty pathetic payloads (I can't find the post now, but there was a case of a Russian tank surviving over a dozen impacts or something along those lines), and the fancier drones with greater ranges and payloads aren't actually as cheap as people assume.

There's only so much extra armor you can reasonably put on the bottom of a vehicle though (no way to fit an anti-drone cage on there), and you'll never be able to fully protect the tracks/wheels, since, by definition, those need to be exposed in order to actually contact the ground, so at the very least a vehicle could be easily disabled (which then leaves it vulnerable for other modes of attack - for example, during the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive the Russians used a lot of helicopter-launched ATGMs to actually finish off tanks and IFVs which had been immobilized in the minefields). Thus, until we invent Star Wars style hovertanks, mines will remain a major threat, and mines that can move around present a whole new dimension. From an earlier article on a similar topic: https://hexbear.net/post/6349607/6574868

“The only thing I feared as a tanker is the idea of a [Family of Scatterable Mines] minefield: something suddenly deployed in front of me from a family of deployable … munitions where there wasn't a minefield before,” he said. “The only thing I think scarier than that is the idea of a mobile minefield.” A group of ground robots “that has the capability to destroy me like a mine from underneath where I'm most vulnerable, but it moves to where I am. And if I don't go that way, it can relocate again and relocate again, deny terrain and deny me the flexibility of being able to be dismissive about a minefield, because that suite of solutions coming at me has the ability to follow me and compensate for tactical decisions I make — that’s the idea,” he said.

payload limits? can't be stopped by cheap defenses.

when an earth quake hits, I'll expect a huge swarm of all kinds of drones and robots.

Look at what happened in Colombia. The only ones looking for survivors are Mexican volunteers and locals