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.
Exactly in 2017 it was very very easy to get thousand of dollars easily from bounty campaign. Now its very hard to get much amount of money from bounty programme.