I've been using blender as soon as the first OSS release, and I never considered the UI to be "bad". Learning curve was much steeper than it is today, but it was very efficient after being learned.
And that's the main point: I'm not pitting blender's UI choices against another product just on the merit of being accessible from the uninitiated or looking at another product. That's the kind of comparison you make if you want to make a clone of another product.
It would be the programmer's equivalent of saying "I don't understand why vi is not more like vscode".