I believe there's more romanticizing in this statement than evidence for it.
Ideas are subject to natural selection as much as individuals are. And for an idea to win this natural selection, it's not necessary to be useful for our species. Some ideas spread will because they give their carriers advantage over other people, like Science; some because they just resonate with our minds well and spread fast, like viral videos from Tiktok. Romanticizing of Spartans could easily fall into the latter category.
I agree that being able to defeat (and possibly kill) your enemies was important for us throughout history, but I doubt that being a stereotypical Spartan helps one do that. In the next parts of the linked post on Spartans, acoup says that they weren't as strong army as they were believed to be. Their greatest strength was their badass fame advertized by Socrates.
It ist only the distance you mention that even allows you to glorify the ultimate dehumanizing act.
That it is even romantice in the context of child soldiers speaks volumes.
Killing is abnormal. Whenever someone is intentionally killed, it is a failure of society and an incredible tragedy.
For the victim of killing, there's no difference between "being killed" and "dying". It's not that your life gets less valuable or your pain gets eased if you die from natural causes. And eventually we all die, death itself is not abnormal, then what's the big deal about killing?
Killing is not a tragedy. Dying early if you could live longer is a tragedy.
Taking someone like that out with a bullet or a drone is much less risky operationally. They also avoid the additional geopolitical complexity of needing occupying forces in the relevant country.
Maybe there should be some pre-operation due process rights, but it seems callous in other ways to insist on non-violence in all cases. Especially in response to catastrophic violence.
A couple of centuries ago violence, wars and killing were a way bigger part of human lives, and it has been like that throughout the whole history.
I don't like glorifying violence, but I want to acknowledge that it's a natural part of life. Some can afford not to deal with it, some cannot.
A lot of violence that went on in Sparta was fundamentally selfish. And quite often it had nothing to do with protecting yourself. And also, quite a lot of it was not brave at all - the treatment of helots or pretty much anyone who was lower in social standing then you was violent but not brave at all. It was violence simply against people with zero chance to defend themselves intended to keep things that way.
There is that odd thing where people kneed jerk assume that violence of the past must have been well reasoned, noble and form of self sacrifice. Pretty often, it is simply not a case.
In modern western society we can generally avoid looking that in the face, for the same reason we can buy packaged meat and separate ourselves from the mass slaughter of animals. But that doesn’t make that fact of life go away and at some level we all understand that.