Yes, if you can find a subject mentioned (by third parties, not just people discussing their own project) in multiple peer-reviewed papers, that is better for establishing notability than blog posts, arxiv preprints, github repositories, pages in SEO content farms, web forum comments, or first-party white papers or press releases.

The criteria are that the coverage is “significant” (i.e. more than just a throwaway mention) and made in “reliable sources” that are independent of the subject of the article. This certainly includes peer-reviewed papers. For examples of reliable sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOURCETYPES

I don’t understand what you are getting at with “... next to historic and outdated 20 yo material...”

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Once notability for the main topic has been established, the criteria for validating specific claims is a bit looser. For example a company’s own website could be used to demonstrate the current version number of a piece of software, a press release (or even a tweet) could be quoted to describe the company’s first-party response to some event, an arxiv preprint from a tenured scientist or mathematician could be used to support some mathematical formula, a blog post by a living person could be used to validate their birthday or the name of their spouse, and the like.