That's a fairly bad mentality in my opinion... Participating in airdrops costs time, which you could've spent on more useful/profitable things...

According to what you've just said, faucets are perfectly worth it: There's no loss!
However, they usually give less than 1 cent worth of crypto per claim and you have to waste a lot of time watching ads & clicking the claim button.

That's the reason for which I prefer to participate in Bounty Campaigns of projects I like and ignore most airdrops. They're simply not worth my time.

Now you may be lucky occasionally, catching an airdrop that does make you some profit, but I find them (unsurprisingly) quite rare.