I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.

Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2].

[1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465

Unfortunately it’s the reason indeed

Basically. This is the same problem with FreeCAD. They just don't care.