It may seem strange but when discussing things like this ("This new thing is going to win") I'm always reminded of the response people here on HN had to Adobe going to subscription-only. There were pages and pages of comments about how it was disrespectful, obviously dumb, CS2 was so good they didn't even need a subscription, how they were just opening themselves up to their enemies who would now win, and how because of all that, Adobe would clearly be regretting such a disastrous decision, they'll see, just wait for them to rue the day. Surprise! Adobe is over 10x more valuable than it was 10 years ago, and is still the 900lb gorilla in the room.

I suspect Blender is "winning" in this area in the same way that Adobe was failing: in the minds of people on this website, and nowhere else.

Google "studios that use blender".

The number of studios not using blender is much larger.

I've seen a surprising number of resumes that are listing it come across my desk recently. I don't think it will occupy the same place in the tool stack that say, Linux does for IT, but adoption is definitely on the uptick. I suspect that this has a lot to do with rendering tech moving more towards the realtime side of things for many applications these days. Blender has a very good realtime viewport, so if you are delivering content into that sort of an environment, it's a natural fit for some things.