For the same reason Maya & friends offer heavily discounted (or even free) educational licenses: people tend to stick with what they initially learned.

That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses to make content either!

So now you've got a decent pool of enthusiastic kids flowing into education with pre-existing Blender knowledge. And Blender is good enough for educational purposes, so as long as it doesn't significantly hamper the students post-education it is very attractive for educators to adopt as well - why bother with all the hassle of getting educational licenses when you can just download it for free?

The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.

> The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.

I was with you up until this part. I was a DVD programmer for years on the de facto standard software which was very expensive and cumbersome for some people to use. Then Apple released DVD Studio Pro which did a lot of abstraction layer simplification for people, but also meant that something could not be done in that software that could be on the big boy package. I know it's an apple/orange situation, but there are times where there's a reason for the cheaper/free price tag. I haven't paid attention to the capabilities of Maya/Blender for nearly a decade, but I'm guessing there are still things that can be done in Maya that cannot be done in Blender.