It’s powerful and pleasant to use. Even the release marketing page is beautiful and well-made.
I like open source as much as the next guy, but outside of developer tools there is little that comes close to Blender in terms of utility and UX.
Is it funding? Specific individuals? Are there PMs and designers? Whatever it is, it’s working!
Relying on individual donations from users helps a lot with blender being aligned to the interest of its actual users. There is not one or a few corporate sponsors controlling everything.
Plus the GPL license which protects the freedom of its users.
The creator apparently was selling it as freemium software in 1998, and then the bubble burst and the corp shutdown in 2002. But the creator created a non-profit called the Blender Foundation, launched a Free Blender campaign [2] (the forum post is still up!) to raise money from its users and bought out the rights to the software from the investors.
[1] https://www.blender.org/about/history/
[2] https://blenderartists.org/t/free-blender-campaign-launched/...
NO other (yes I’d die on the hill) open source software has good UX and it’s horrible for adoption by the larger public.
GIMP vs Krita is a similar story. GIMP never will be the Photoshop replacement they aimed to be