A more relevant historical parallel was the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq, in the first 5 years of the war, had largely degraded Iranian air defenses and was able to carry out many thousands of airstrikes, at some points even using strategic bombers, many of them with precision weapons. That was enough to degrade Iranian industry, but not enough to destroy it, and by the late 80s Iran still won the war of attrition, and managed to develop their weapons industry.

By the end of the war Iran was using domestic surveillance drones to direct artillery, and was even experimenting with the first attack drones by fitting RPGs on their larger surveillance UAVs, had reverse engineered and started domestically producing TOW missiles, had started producing the Shahab-1 ballistic missile (a Scud clone), Silkworm-clone radar-guided antiship cruise missiles, etc..., all the while their air force was down to less than 100 hundred aircraft in various degrees of disrepair and with very few advanced munitions remaining.

The war ultimately ended in a stalemate, even after the US intervened in Praying Mantis.