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Plagiarism is still plagiarism, ie word theft.

Perhaps the automatic plagiarism detection used (if used) didn’t include blogs in its corpus, so it wasn’t flagged.

But still the author should have known that unattributed copying is word theft.

Both undergrads and postgrads are taught this on week 1. Professional/career academics are expected to abide by this as well.

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FWIW, I've run into this with preprints. I had a paper up on a preprint server, and it was under review for a while. In the meantime, I became aware of another paper that pretty clearly used my paper and an earlier closely related one (to the point that some of the language was the same), passing it off as original. When this came up, their response was pretty similar to that in the OP here: things not formally peer reviewed "don't count" and essentially don't exist (and presumably are fair game to plagiarize?).

The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.

It feels a little like a wild west to me.

Half of academics are thiefs, sending the honest ones to drive taxis. Thats how we got here..

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