Getting airdrops is easy you just need to register and fill some form and most of the time that will be it and you will get some free coins, the real difficult thing is to find airdrops that are profitable and spend enough time collecting those coins, and for that the only thing you can do is to read about their project and see if you are convinced by the idea of the developers and act accordingly
you are right, this time..joining airdrops isn't that simple unlike last previous years.
But although the instructions are more difficult, the main goal is to earn as many free tokens as you can because truly not all of them are paying but when you get your free tokens then you'll need to wait until they bumped into coin exchanges in order to earn money as you expected the moment you signed up airdrops.