If the fee is considered quite high, even more than 5$, this will be very suspicious, right? Therefore, we as airdrop hunters also have to consider the pluses and minuses, and the possibilities of whether this is a scam or not.
Does airdrop that explicitly asks for a fee still exist? As far as my experience goes, most of them have pivoted to fees farming as mentioned above, or locking your tokens for some period of time before you can withdraw it again. At least that's how it goes with layer-2 airdrop, while NFTs airdrop requires you to mint some NFT and so on. I don't think scammers will use this $5 paid upfront technique nowadays since it won't be as effective as before.