The main issue is that airdrops are not reliable. You can get a reasonable amount of money from a project you never expected, and you can get out with dust from a project you hyped. That's just the truth about airdrops, and you will never be certain of one if you get paid.
I missed on some airdrops that paid really well, like EIGEN, I also don't want to miss out on anyone again, but I will also not rely on them because they can disappoint. But if I get a reliable airdrop, I will participate because I am fed up with the dust rewards gotten from telegram tap to earn airdrops.
Airdrops are rewarding if the market is sufficient with liquidity, that's when you see new projects raised money from different individuals and then will want to make awareness about their project by spread information and then reward people for doing such but if the market is not too good, most of the airdrops that will be coming wouldn't fulfill their promises and if they don't, they wouldn't he able to pay participants that help them perform some tasks.
Projects like Eigen rewarded the participants because they minted some NFTs and that was not recently, it was some months back and some people that staked ethereum which they bridge through their network. That means they risk and trusted the project to bridge their coins and provide TVL for the project so they can give lifea and support the project, that's more like retroactive airdrop in my opinion and it's dangerous to do but if you can risk it, the reward will be bigger than what you might imagine.