Burns incentive people to hold too, because there is less selling to worry about reducing the value of your investment.

Also, there is significant utility value in holding, for both RC and voting, as well as demand for HIVE in order to create accounts and do other things that burn (like converting to create HBD). The less HIVE in circulation the more this demand levers into price.

I don't think it is clear at all that airdropping onto all stakeholders helps the price at all. The original Steem design had a 100% per year airdrop. It crushed the price, and was expected to, to the point that there was a reverse-split built into the design to keep from overflowing decimal digits as the price declined.