It’s because they see Blender as “fighting for open source” against 3DS Max and the others. People do the same thing with Godot. You used to see it with Firefox before some of the recent bad press.
I assign Blender success to first passing the "good enough" bar and then focusing on being attractive to beginners. Once enough beginners became addicted, there was no turning back and Blender slowly started to eat other communities. Development then was financed and a virtuous cycle started that made Blender the 3d modelling tool with the largest community of users ever.
There’s been bad press for Blender? Genuinely curious!