Of course, not all projects compensate early participants fairly, and some do not pay in the end, as happened with the SUI project. Some projects set Difficult conditions for those who qualify for Airdrop, as happened with Starknet, or rely on discord rules or points, and so on. Also, some projects do not announce airdrop dates for early participants who interacted with their ecosystem and interacted on their own network. Hunting these airdrops and getting rewarded depends on luck, so there is no guarantee. Even some get a small amount of tokens, and it is possible that the participants paid more fees for participation than what they claimed their Airdrop. Still, frankly, I find that this year, many promising airdrops were launched and were listed on Binance and the TOP exchanges in the market. Hence, there are plenty of opportunities for anyone who has a surplus of funds and would like to try his luck in the airdrops arena.
Luck can be a determining factor, but that will not completely happen because everything can be done by analyzing each project that will be involved. SUI does look bad because it only sells their tokens without giving an Airdrop to the community and the community is angry with that, But what's even worse is Starknet which is simply ineligible when it doesn't hold 0.005 ETH and despite having thousands of volumes and hundreds of transactions they are not eligible. The community is the strongest and if the community is disappointed then their project will just end