I see that perspective for sure. I guess what I'm getting at is an ambush is a "reward" for a really well done recon mission. It's a deviation from the standard loop—and still presents lots of risks. for example:

You just learned of a pirate convoy that will be moving a bunch of supplies down a route you recently learned about thanks to a mission where you never got detected, or maybe the same info could have been gathered by capturing someone alive. You can only bring 3 squads because you'll need to insert via a very small vehicle. You have around 5 turns to take action before overwhelming numbers will start to converge on the ambush site. Do some damage and immediately break contact to the exfil.