In the old days, users used a platform only once and suddenly an airdrop was announced. That happened in the first one, the Uniswap airdrop.
As someone i do not remember said: "what the first did was smart, but is not smarter to repeat currently". And the airdrops become more and more difficult, demanding thousands of crypto transacted, in a lot of transactions during many months. One example was Paraswap, who exclude many users from their airdrop and caused widespread anger.
Coming back to the old days, hunting airdrops was basically to follow few insiders, read the news and use all protocols that had no token. Currently there are thousands of influencers announcing airdrops even from projects that did not comment, projects announcing airdrops before have a product and a lot of noise.
I feel is is getting harder and harder to get good airdrops, when some arrive the tokens are diluted by a huge amount of airdrop hunters not to mention projects that "gamefi" airdrops with tasks and points, terrible.
Maybe it is a wave that passed, not sure about the future of airdrop hunting.
Well it all turned into crap after people regretted they didn't participate to uniswap, imx/gods, and projects like bayc, when people got rewarded of being early supporters. So they started to overcompensate by preparing and botting every potential airdrop. This was just painful to watch with Arbitrum for example. There are videos where people revealed their botting and got rich from it. That took my taste from the whole game. Wrong people were winning and this wouldn't make any sense as a reward system.
And for some reason people thought that pre-announced airdrops would bring money, which they obviously never did. At least not for people who didn't bot the crap out of them.