Yes, that's right, all the airdrops you take part in have instructions, and of course each participant must follow the instructions given so that you meet the criteria to get prizes from the airdrop you take part in. If you don't follow the instructions from the airdrop, I think you will waste your time without giving any tokens.
It's retrodrop trend, and here often you will have to go without any instructions. There are speculative guides certainly though.
Airdrops are high in risk some airdropped assets may be worthless and it is difficult to predict which projects will succeed early on. That you can search for hours and participate in airdrops only to discover that the price of the coin has dropped before you can sell it is not easy to get the right reward so the criteria needs to be fixed.
If criteria has been said beforehand and it's overly saturated project, it's likely the airdrop you are farming won't have much value since it'll be much dilluted.
Regarding price, most airdrop hunters tend to care less about the price as long as they get their effort's worth and some don't consider their efforts at all, that even if they get worthless tokens they just don't care.