Question about enemy spawn rates and patrols

Hello everyone and thanks for checking out my post, my question seems kind of simple but I am not sure as to what the actual answer is.

So the set up is I was diving on Cyberstan and going around blowing up secondary bases for both the XP and RP rewards, but in my head if the enemy has less bases in the sector, that means less readily available reinforcements, so things like drop ship call ins and patrols should be less frequent or taken longer to get on the map because they are coming from farther away.

I then had a random I was teamed up with go off during a mission telling me I was making the mission harder because in fact the game works in the exact opposite of my reasoning, the more of the secondary bases you blow up the more frequent and faster drop ins and patrols become.

I can't find anything online myself so I am wondering if there might be others a bit more knowledgeable that can tell me if this is true or not.