Everything is possible in crypto if sheer dedication and ability to keep patience is there. Though, I'd say that $500k is unrealistic for me actually, $50k is a highly possible scenario for $500 if you've got the guts to hold a token for a somewhat long time. Remember that 400 UNI (Uniswap) tokens airdrop? That airdrop alone is now worth >$13200 and for how much was it given? Just some $20 worth of trading done on Uniswap during a specified time!?
Most of these things truly just rely on luck in the end. You can't spend your whole life hunting for airdrops that may or may not be worth tens of thousands. That's how bounty hunters got tricked. They all heard the story of getting 10k for some Twitter bounty and spent the next 3 years trying every airdrop hoping to get lucky:)
Unfortunately that type of thing happened a few times and because of that everyone now expects something like that to happen again and again, and specifically on the projects they spend time on as well which is why there are so many bounty hunters. I am not saying it won't happen, because like you said it is all based on luck, but since people do not realize what type of luck we are talking about and why it should be very rare, they just assume if they go into every airdrop they can find, eventually one of them will make them super rich.
I wish things were that simple, I have dealt with airdrops for a very long time and I can tell you that most of them worth absolutely nothing, more commonly projects that does pre-sale do not even go back to pre-sale prices neither, they drop too, which means there are not that many coins that make people profit in the first month, only a very few of them does that.
