They are now funded by all major tech companies. So much for not being "industry standard" (by so many Maya or 3ds Max artists I talked to).
In concrete terms, it means convincing universities to train students on your tools. Autodesk has the dollars to spend on efforts like that.
Blender isn't THE industry standard by any means, but I don't think it would be a stretch to call it an industry standard. EA uses it for a lot of their concept work, Ubisoft uses it for their animation studio, it's the modelling tool at Infinity Ward, etc.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
The new asset browser is also another great addition for plugging into pipelines.
As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.