-snip-
That probably was true for a while, but as time went on the term was used for other purposes (mostly by crypto marketing teams, I'd bet), which gave it additional meaning.
This is also from the wiki page:
What are required for airdrops?
Airdrops require that anyone who wants to participate should have the following: 1. Bitcointalk account 2. A telegram account 3. A waves wallet or other ERC20 wallets 4. A Facebook account 5. A Twitter account
Others can require accounts like LinkedIn.
None of those should be necessary if airdrops, in this sense, were strictly referring to just forked coins. You only need your private key for Bitcoin Cash, for example.
This site also describes it in a different way:
Airdrops can be delivered in a variety of ways, including forks (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Diamond), ICO purchases (e.g.Raiden Network), and freebies (e.g. Binance gifting customers with 500 free TRX). Sometimes an airdrop will occur if a team behind the blockchain project decides to give away free tokens to the cryptocurrency community.
The newbies are probably just referring to the colloquial meaning of the term, rather than the traditional one.