^ It's not free money anymore, so called airdrops lately asks user to do certain things to be eligible unlike before where you just had to give your address to receive the drop.
But if you think about it, it's the same difference... Except the airdrops prior to them getting more popular rewarded real users as they never announced that there would be an airdrop. Arbitrum was a good example of this. They announced that there would be no token and ETH will be used for gas at launch. But lo and behold they did have plans to have a token and the claiming was announced out of the blue.
That's the right way of doing it.
The airdrops now are like 'hey we'll have an airdrop soon (maybe), use our app'.. Lol.