I’m not sure what Russia has in the way of similar besides drones.

Russia has actually gotten quite good at drones.

But the Jeep vs. tank comparison is bunk, especially the direct dollar value comparison: Your million dollar tank shoots way further, hits way harder, and its crew will survive when hit. Instead of having to train a new one and write letters to their families you now have a veteran crew that probably learned an important lesson.

We're seeing the opposite approach on the Russian side -- have cheap tanks that blow up easily and take out the crew with them. They have lots of tanks, and also lots of people (at least in principle), but they don't have nearly enough training capacity to teach new crews.

Even if Ukraine wanted to it could not afford that approach. Neither in terms of manpower, nor in political terms: As we all know war is the continuation of politics and not employing Soviet meat grinder doctrines is very much part of the whole not wanting to be Russia thing. If Ukrainians wanted to be subject to Dedovshchina they wouldn't be fighting in the first place.

Why do they even need the M1 tanks?

Numbers. Abrams are a pain in the arse for logistics but there's a ton of them around collecting dust in the US, Leos and everything else are in way shorter supply.

You could marginally increase the survivability of one tank (say, by 20%)... Or you could build another tank and increase the survivability of someone that would otherwise be infantry by an order of magnitude.

Tanks take bags of flesh off the battleground and that's extremely advantageous.

The US operates under the assumption that they will be fighting a war on the other side of the world, so designing a more robust tank is important both in terms of PR (because dead bodies coming home is bad), in terms of logistics (because shipping twice the number of tanks around the world isn't that great), and in terms of who they're fighting (mostly insurgents without advanced anti-tank munitions, so survivability is far higher when hit).