Very frequently in this type of conversations a layman suggests "just make a constellation of low/average quality telescopes that acts like one big telescope". Presumably because they have heard of "long baseline telescopes"[1]. No, that does not work in the optical and infrared because you can not keep the signals from different telescopes coherent with one another (the technology to do that is science fiction today and it would be crazy expensive the first time realized). This is not to say there is no merit in the idea that many cheap telescopes can be useful in some other (non-visible-or-IR-spectrum) way, but the typical bombastic suggestions are simply wrong and are a disservice to an otherwise interesting idea. We will continue needing big-mirror optical and IR telescopes for quite a while if we want to continue studying the universe.
For the cameras facing earth, you wouldn't need fantastic resolution for it to be useful. With a resolution of 50 meters, you could track suezmax ships. With a resolution of 5 meters, you could track commercial aircraft. Not great, but it would help with a Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 like incident.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...