Some are true, many projects cannot pay because of high fees Others don't pay because the project is a scam, don't send money to them
That should be the right answer but yesterday i was seeing a project that's called p2p and the manager who has been managing the p2p campaign has been creating an announcement if the participants wanna get their tokens and they must have sent a small amount of ethereum to be used as the gas fees to get the tokens. The tokens have already sent to the participants who have been sending the gas fees.
That means sometimes the small projects that didn't have enough gas to cover the transactions to the participants will need help from the participants to get their rewards.
In this case, the team has the right to decide what kind of distribution that they wanna try to do.