I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.
The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.
But when I say "niche hobby software," I'm talking about the relative scale of the user base.
Every working adult who touches a computer in 2026 is using office software. Photo editing is so common that "Photoshop" has become a verb. These two use cases are behemoths compared to 3D modelers.
Oh definitely. The way some people seem oblivious to all of Word's faults and weirdness― …Oh! You weren't talking about Microsoft Word!
Software having some quirks is fine. Most people would be fine with LibreOffice if they were taught the rudiments of word processing (that; not using Word, but actual word processing) and never came into a situation where they had to use Word or Google Docs.
The difference between all those tools is that LibreOffice will still do its thing in the future. Just as it has done for a long while, while Word will have forced some new subscription model on you and force-fed you some AI-integration, and Google will have done some similar googley shit.
Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).
But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.
I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.