Yes, an image that's taken from three to four orders of magnitude further away is much worse than one taken from close up. Unless you spend a lot on the optics and make the satellite really big. But while the NRO is busy pointing space telescopes at earth, the private sector has so far been more interested in using these images to estimate crop yields over entire countries, or look at how full parking lots of certain companies are. For those use cases it's more useful to launch more lower-cost satellites to get more coverage more frequently, at the expense of quality.