I think this is not how this really works, but to some extent, you are right, some projects owners find it difficult to pay bounty hunters if their ICO or IEO or whatever didn't go well, the reason for this for some is because the project might not continue so whats the need spending their money to distribute useless tokens, but for some others, it's just wickedness.
And there are still some that get all the money to run the project successfully but still refuse to pay bounty hunter out of greed and deceit, this kind of projects I don't trust cus sooner or later, they will go down and investors will loose money.