Indeed, I have. Satellites that stare at the space have to go around the same geostationary orbit in order to hold a point of view. That means they're at 23,000 miles. I don't believe they're reading licence plates from that distance. Typically, there is weather between them, so they're not used for optical sensors.
Other satellite orbits are closer and can get the kind of resolution you've described, but they don't stay in one place. They're always transiting whatever the targeted space might be. There are polar orbits, which are very attractive. They zip over the two poles in a 90-minute timeframe. But at an altitude, say, of 100 or 150 miles, their field of view is necessarily quite narrow. So it takes a constellation of these to have any measure of regular coverage.
Those are limitations that particularly feature in our Arctic. Those geostationary platforms just don't even see the poles because of the angle of look to the poles of the globe. The polar orbits up in high latitudes involve necessarily quite quick passes with fairly narrow coverage. Those limitations are overcome, to my mind, by UAVs that can loiter in the air mass and do an orbit, but they're really not leaving the space. They're not going to the South Pole.