Hi, Im an aspiring technical artist with no industry expirience. I apologize if this is a dumb question but do professionals use blender?
And if so, do professional riggers use tools / add on’s like Riggify or Auto Rig Pro for Blender?
While Autodesk products remain dominant in the industry, Blender is becoming more and more widely adopted. It seems to be especially strong in the modeling and texturing departments. It’s mostly prevalent in indie and small studios, but larger studios use it as well.
In terms of character animation, however, it lags behind, as Maya or Max are still preferred in this area, but it’s catching up. Anything character-animation and rigging related is still pretty much dominated by Maya.
Ideally you should always strive to learn more software packages in your area of expertise, at least to some degree. This both makes you more flexible, and also changes how you look at some things, broadens your mind 
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If I remember correctly, Blender dev decided to stop following the industry standard on stuff like python version. Most studios with pipeline developers where pretty bumed out as it complicate things. Is it still the case?
Short answer - no, it’s not an issue anymore.
Longer answer:
The main issue for me was always them not following industry standards for viewport navigation, object transform manipulation and hotkeys. They have their own idea for that, but I’ve seen them adding “Industry standard” hotkey layout and object manipulators that look and work a lot closer to what most people are used to.
As for Python version - yeah, when the entire industry was still sitting on the old Python 2 they used Python 3. But now the industry is catching up, Python 2 was officially deprecated (not just in VFX industry, but overall), and VFX industry now uses Python 3 as well.
In fact they (vfx industry, Maya included) are now changing minor python version almost every release. It does not break regular scripts and tools written in python, but if you’re compiling your own custom libraries for Python using Cython or C++, then you’re f-ed, as they are not always compatible. I kind wish they’d stick with 1 python version for a few years and a few software versions.
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