What is newsworthy isn't a rational thing. To use real world parallels:
33 Miners were trapped in a Chilean mine in 2010. They got massive news coverage for months.
In Afganistan, 7000 civilians were killed by one side or another in 2010. In 2010, 31,000 Americans were killed in firearms homicides and 32,000 were killed in automobile accidents. None of these got comparable news coverage in the US to the Chilean miners, yet all involved massively more death. If they did get coverage, it was almost certainly a perfunctory "Today, an airstrike in Afganistan killed 20 people... now back to those Chilean Miners!"
To go back to EVE: The way I read that trapped miner story isn't that the story worth telling was that 200 people would die, it's that they had actually survived this far. Survival in a space accident is newsworthy, death in a space accident is routine.
And with EVE tech the crew is probably not manually loading, no. But they are fixing the loading device when it gets knocked out of place. Programming the nanite goo when a repair is needed. So on and so forth. The numbers on crew are actually quite low compared to the size of the ships.
As far as I am concerned crew death is a fact of life in EVE. So when I see someone IC talking about not using crew on larger ships, what Gaven ICly hears is "So-and-so is in denial about the human cost of their activity." A few people have believably gone the rogue drone route, but only a few.