Seems like they knew exactly where it was going to fail.

Yes. The drone was accessing the tower where cable has snapped before, so other cables there were under highest load. The fact that drone was there in the "right" moment likely just a coincidence, probability of which was increased by the hourly inspections.

And they must have known it was imminent, it seems unlikely they had a drone over it 24/7 given the available hover time.

For a use case like this, I'd imagine that tethered multicopters could be a very nice fit. If you can just plug the base station into a power outlet, suddenly 24/7 doesn't seem that crazy.

PS: Apparently I'm not alone with this idea, search engine comes up with hits. https://elistair.com/ even have a tether kit you can plug into some DJI models (and others) instead of the conventional battery pack. Out of Lyon, France, nice!

Bonus, if they tethered it to the suspended receiver, it would automatically follow the action right down to impact, albeit with unpredictable viewing angles.

They could use a spherical/360 camera and correct the viewing angle in post.

I attended several BLM events this past summer and local law enforcement had a couple tethered drones up in the area.

Please decide, Lyon or Nice?

They were doing hourly inspections of the structure ever since the report came out a couple of weeks ago.

On the bottom of the linked page there's a press release from last month: one cable failed in August, then another a few weeks later at 60% of expected of load, and they decided on Nov19 it's unsafe to fix it and it should be decommissionned.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=301674&org=NS...