For me the main reason is the luck of demands, the token is listed in not good exchange with low volume.
Pre-sale tokens are not locked and big investors who got huge discounts starts to sell at the very beginning.
I think that what you are referring to is the hybrid projects between ICOs and airdrops, they basically give investors privileges, but I think they are very dangerous, they can scam us.
The fact is that to a greater extent everything just happens as your opponent said, when investors and other cryptocurrency users receive tokens for free, at a cheap price with big discounts, and after listing they start immediately selling at a starting price, which in any case is significantly higher than what were when buying. In addition, I am confident that many projects have unscrupulous developers who themselves seek to sell their tokens in order to earn real money that they were not able to collect during the preliminary sale.