Do we perceive Bitcoin miners as malicious? No. There is a game designed for them where they can focus on maximizing their profit and still do something productive for others.
Why not do the same thing with airdrop farmers?
This is one of my primary points towards inclusion of Ethereum network validators, by joining the beacon chain despite profit incentives have contributed meaningful work towards the network security, of which StarkNet inherits its security from.
This metric cannot be gamed especially pre-merge/withdrawals, and as this type of distribution has never been done before, there’s no incentive to game it.
I’ve talked about some ideas here. "Arbitrum Airdrop Sybil Loophole": Proposed Measures to Address the Issue for the StarkNet Project - #13 by GLCstaked
The main thing I believe is to incentivise ‘strong on-chain’ profile over one or small number of addresses, vs ‘weak on-chain’ profile over many.
This is implicit incentivisation and can only be achieved by projects going this route, unfortunately I think ARB has emboldened sybiloors.