No airdrop = no free money for those participating. That's all. 
I don't see the crypto space getting worse with the absence of airdrops however, those new projects will find another way to kickstart their campaign because most of these projects are using airdrops to start their project or at least launch their token.
If airdrops suddenly disappear, I'm thinking that we might return to the old ICO-type of distributing the tokens where projects have a so-called "soft cap" and "hard cap".
It can be said that "free money" has disappeared, some complaints about airdrop payments that are not equivalent to what is done have also disappeared... besides the bad impacts, of course there are good impacts...
So far, some of us agree that airdrop participants very often cheat by using more than one account/multi-account games or farming... from there we have actually seen how imperfect this airdrop is used as a developer promotion media... of the several existing methods, airdrop is indeed the easiest to increase website traffic, YouTube views, subscribers, followers, likes and several other social media aspects... moreover, developers do not need to spend a lot of money to pay participants, only tokens whose prices are still very questionable in the future.... So actually, airdrop itself has many shortcomings too... However, it seems that many do not agree when it is removed... for some reason, maybe someone knows more about this...
And to return to the softcap & hardcap era, I don't really understand the relationship with marketing, but what I do know is that softcap is the minimum limit for a project to run... meaning if it cannot reach the softcap, the project will not be kicked off... while hardcap, as far as I understand it is money maximum that can be obtained from token sales... please correct me if there is something wrong with my understanding...
It can also be used as a subtle promotional method, where an investor will grow in confidence when he sees that the project has reached softcap....