Bounties are not very good at the moment, there are no good enough payouts for participants except signature campaigns. But you can switch to airdrops because some projects provide considerable incentives for early adopters. Usually working on Tesnet Network, I still participate on ZkSync and some other networks.
You are definitely right. With the usual bounties gone and may not even be coming back even with the bullish market in, opportunities to earn Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is getting slimmer these days. We can never go back to the 2017 days where almost all ICOs really made money, made it to the exchanges and got some value along the way (though of them eventually died and evaporated months after). Today, the market has shifted towards airdrops involving tasks and testnet but with so many new projects going on it can be hard to keep up and there is no way to know which will really make it to exchanges and gain value for their coins or tokens. In other words, risks are always following us whatever we do and wherever we go.
Yes, although there are still a lot of bounties in the last couple of years, it is not like 2017 wherein bounty hunting is a like a thing to us, and for some it is their job and probably it really open the flood gates for many users to cheat campaigns but the good thing is that they are caught.
As for making money on Bitcoin, I do agree that it's not going to be easy. The media even portray it like a scam, but we all know that is not true as scams as get rich quick scheme. But Bitcoin is not, there is a learning curve and then you also need to have some money if you want to trade in the beginning.