It's understandable that projects are delaying the distribution. With thousands of participants, the project might spend up to $10,000 for the gas transactions which is not wise as it can be used on other expenses.
If you believed in the project and the team is doing great, trust them as you have no choice. The best proposal maybe is, they can ask their users to pay the gas instead which costs about $15-20 although not a good idea for those who have low rewards. Or maybe form an internal transfer within their platform.
Fees are just excuses and if they do really mind off with that thing then they should at least tell the public or the participants on having that kind of problem for them to
understand the situation and wont really be making out some further fuss about or towards the project and also those project owners do need to show up some transparency.
You can eventually able to detect out to those teams which are really that paying off their participants compared to those who dont have any plan at all since from the beginning.
These had been a common problem of most bounty hunters which you wouldnt even know if you get paid or not after all the work that you had done in months or more time.
You didn't read my whole statement and just focus on "fees". I'm talking about
good projects in general, saying something about fees that's why rewards are delay. That's why I hope they consider internal transactions. Of course and obviously, it was an excuse by the project if the bounty ended several months prior to the rise of the gas price.
If you have some list of those projects that take fees as excuses and bounty ends prior to the rise of ETH gas price then better to list it here so that it will be flagged as untrustworthy by the community.