Illinois, or at least Cook County, or at least Chicago, may have improved access to SNAP and similar benefits in recent years—I haven't lived there in seven years, and my second-hand experience came via under-employed friends who had the misfortune of graduating college into the workforce circa the 2008–10 economic crisis. At that time, such services weren't very digitized, there simply wasn't the infrastructure to meet the number of applicants, and you had to essentially show up at an office miles away from where most people lived (a big deal in the city, where a lot of people don't drive) and queue up a few hours before the office even opened, on the prayer you would actually be seen. Needless to say, this often necessitated taking a day off from work, without even knowing your case would be handled—something obviously not possible for a lot of people. The actual qualifications thresholds, however, weren't that onerous—there just wasn't the infrastructure, and I suspect that was a downstate issue versus a municipal issue, since SNAP was state-administered and there's always some friction between Springfield and Chicago.
In Montana, the eligibility requirements are in fact pretty onerous, and do feel like they're designed "to find reasons to make people ineligible".
