I think your friend are telling the truth. Nowadays, getting reward from bounty is too hard to think about even. I can't remember when people last say that they had got a chunk amount of money from bounty while in 2017, it was easy to get thousands of dollar as far as I know.
Because there are now shit tons of people who are ready to spam/work for really cheap price. Remember, the amount of rewards that are to distributed by the developers are limited, but the number of people willing to join those program is really huge. Thus, rewards are being distributed among these huge (why wouldn't the developers hire them? More people = more advertisement/promotion for them) number of people reducing rewards per people.