After Pathfinder someone from NASA wrote a book about their new "faster, better, cheaper" approach to missions. Usually you can't have all 3 but they managed to get lucky. That made it particularly amusing when the book and concept were getting popular as the next 2 missions were failing.

Most of the velocity of Pathfinder was shed using aerobraking and parachutes. The crash-balloon landing system just shed the last tiny sliver of velocity after cutting the chutes.

Ah, yeah, you could call airbags lithobraking. I thought you referred ironically to the Mars Polar Lander, but it of course flew in the 1999 launch window rather than 1997.