I don't care with airdropped legendary nor self made legendary, the most important point they shouldn't shitposting.
Once in a while a Legendary account with exactly 1000 Merits wakes up, and most of the time they'll be shitposting. It's either a hacked account, or an account farmer from back when that was still possible.
Unless LoyceV has some data, it seems impossible to tell.
I have
Merit data (from 13 days ago), which shows only 395 users have earned enough Merit to become Legendary on their own. I never stored profile data, but
BPIP shows 663 Legendary accounts out of the 1000 users with most Activity. That list ends with 1970 Activity, so the full list would be much longer.
I'm pretty sure this is still correct:
I was told that the majority of legendary members got their ranks before the merit system.