Another thing that changed since 10y ago when I used Blender: I used to have to convince people who are interested in 3d artwork "you should really try Blender, no really, it's worth your time"

Nowadays, everyone I talk to already is. Blender seems to be the 3d default.

Krita isn't quite at the same level of popularity but it seems to be getting closer. I see all sorts of non-traditionally-FOSS people using it as their default tool. Pretty wild.

I think one of the other big surprising changes though is that Blender is increasingly becoming a viable option for 2d artwork of pretty much all kinds.

What's *really* wild is that with Grease Pencil it kind of hits the middle ground between raster based painting in something like Krita and vector based artwork in something like Inkscape. That's *on top of* full integration with the rest of Blender's toolkit. Powerful stuff.