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.
Yes, I think it's because of the ambiguity about airdrops like that that makes people more excited about telegram projects with TON. Even I'm trying to experience this myself. It's like a trend that is being adopted that looks like binance has to launch Moonbix, Kucoin launches xKucoin to increase interaction, resonance and acceptance of users to expand on telegram, I think that's the purpose and maybe it's becoming a real airdrop platform right now.