If there are people who have experienced earning from the referral scheme I can say that it is not bad if the system is done properly. Not everyone is called to be an affiliate marketer, and you have nothing to lose if you try.
Even though they are newbies in this industry, they gave the guts to do it because there are many social media platforms that can share the referral bonus and maybe it also depends on the platform you share/
You do have a good point, and the most outstanding statement here is that, "not everyone is called to be an affiliate marketer".
I believe the OP isn't referring to referral bonuses in its entirety as a waste of time, but the majority of it, today, it is pretty difficult to come across a platform that pays really good amount for their referral program, and even if they do,, finding referrals who can or will be loyal to the platform is also another very big challenge, in the end, you discover that trying to make money from referring people to casino is actually a waste of time and effort, it only pays good for a very few persons.
and for this reason I said before that the way in which the advertising campaign should be carried out to obtain referrals has changed a lot, at least for people who have been doing this for 8 years, they will already understand what I am talking about, for example if someone takes the referral link from your casino and pay for advertising on some site, the chances of that person getting a referral are very few, this is because old casinos already have many customers, it is difficult to get referrals for old casinos, second point is that even if you get some referrals nothing guarantees that they will be very active and that they will bet a lot of money, third point is that when paying for advertising on other sites the person is spending money, imagine that that person spends 100$ on advertising and in the end he only manages to get 5 referrals that will earn him 10$ of referrals commission, that person will be with 90$ of losses
to get around all this the best solution is to create your own website in which you have added many new and old casinos, so when you spend 100$ paying for advertising on your website you will be getting traffic to your website and many referrals to various casinos that are added to your website, so even if 100 people create an account in 100 casinos that are on your website and these 100 people give you 2$ in commission in each casino you will have 200$ and it will be very difficult for people to stop playing, soon you make a profit and you will get more referrals constantly thanks to the search engines in which you will place your website, of course you will have to put a lot of effort into the seo and many other things