I'm am a fairly competent photographer so I know about ISO, shutter speed, and aperture.  With photography, you sometimes want a wide aperture to get a shallow depth of field.  But with a drone, things are almost always off at a far distance and so the "narrow" depth of field is not going to be noticable.

The reason I'm asking to help me pick out which ND filter to use on a particular occasion.  I'm thinking finding the brights spot and pick a filter so that f/11 or similar would properly expose it.  Then that would allow room to open the aperture up if necessary to capture the darker areas.  All this assume that the shutter speed is get at 180 degrees.

Is there real life occasions where a wide aperture is desirable (other than to get the proper exposure)?

The sweet spot for photography on the M2P is about f5.    You can use the zebra stripes to check exposure.

But with a drone, things are almost always off at a far distance and so the "narrow" depth of field is not going to be noticable.

Forget about depth of field.
Your drone camera has huge depth of field at any aperture.
You can probably forget about the whole 180° "rule" as it's really not going to make any difference to your videos anyway.