Airdrops have for every long time be a waste of time, the recent airdrops are just looking for users to actually promote me then and nothing more, worst of them are actually those referral based ones.
Airdrops way back before 2017 are really good airdrops, since it was the time of discovery, many airdrops just needs an address and a participation post and you got your airdrop coins, unlike airdrops nowadays. I still remember one airdrop that gives 1 BTC amount of coins to each participant sadly it was too late when I heard of it. These participants do nothing but post their address, and boom, they got their free coins.
For bitcoin there was nothing like airdrop all I know that the early users got were faucets then from different platforms and this also has died down.
The early faucet claimers are lucky because the amount of Bitcoin given is really huge. I think the biggest amount of BTC given by a Bitcoin faucet is 5 BTC per claim. It was not a huge amount during those time but I wonder if someone had claimed from this faucet and forgot about it, and it has still untouched until today.
The difference between these two is that airdrop is a one-time giveaway, while a faucet can be claimed multiple times depending on the cooling time until the faucet rundry