Still no Galarian birds and I couldn’t catch Pupitar because it spawned on the exact spot as a wild Aipom and when I caught Aipom, Pupitar was no longer there.
Day 5 of the Daily Nonsense. 
Game crashed again, apparently playing in the evening did not help the issues so it really is just the game that causes the problems.
And still no Galarian Bird either. What a surprise.
I finally found a Galarian legendary bird and it was Zapdos, but it unfortunately ran away. 
It was windy weather in the game so it looks like Galarian birds appear more often when they are weather boosted.
Reached end of day yesterday without having an opportunity to do the incense thing, and couldn’t leave my office, so for the heck of it I tried popping a stink pot anyway. No movement got me no spawns. Not even non-incense ones. 
Popped one today and walked around. Managed to catch enough to finish stage 1 of the special research. Now stage 2 says to do it 6 more times and catch 100 of the buggers… Oy.
Can’t help thinking Niantic is trying to recondition us to walk around with incense (after we got accustomed to using stationary incense for over a year). Sorry, dudes, but it’s not going to make me any less zealous for us to get the stationary incense back. (It made the game so much more playable for shut-ins, and for mostly-shut-ins like me.)
Day 6 of the daily nonsense. I clicked on a Zubat the moment that Machoke spawned and my eyes thought it was a Galarian Articuno but my mind knew it probably wouldn’t be. Sometimes I wish I were wrong.
Got two evolved spawns off the Stink Bomb though, so I guess it’s an improvement.
Finally a decent haul. Zapdos ran away, but I’m already glad I finally got a chance to even encounter it, and it actually loaded the encounter too so that’s already two steps in the right direction.
The worst was after the sixt day receive a Dodrio as commpensation… please, aren’t there Pokemon more interesting?
I’ve used 7 daily incenses now and encountered 1 Galarian legendary bird. This seems to be about the average frequency…
So…with a catch rate of 0.3% that means - the average time it will take someone to get a Moltres / Zapdos / Articuno is 7 years!
To get all 3 - well… do you fancy dedicating 20 more years of your life to playing Pokémon Go every single day? …and that’s if you don’t get any duplicates.
Conclusion: Daily incense = waste of my shiny time 
After finishing the investigation in my main, I received at the end the first daily incense in my secondary… and what a fun: with this first incense I reached the second part of the investigation with a count of zero incense used, but 7 Pokémon catched with the help of the daily incense 
And of course without have seen a legendary bird.
