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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Necro alert 
Blender’s a great piece of software but the team’s attitude towards existing solutions definitely gets in the way of studio adoption. More than once in this topic I’ve heard TA’s say versions of
Blender doesn’t want to be part of the pipeline, it wants to be the pipeline
Obviously Blender has a huge community so it’s not quite fair say there’s a unified “Blender approach” to critique, but in general there’s a lot of disinterest in working with existing studio infrastructure that has been built up over the last 25 years, which tends to alienate the people who handle pipeline decision making in commercial contexts. Sure, the Blender software is free but the cost of rewriting decades’ worth of existing tooling and systems can be as large or larger than the cost of Maya or Max seats.
It’s a shame that there’s so much of this stuff floating around, Autodesk often acts as if they were the industry’s landlord rather than a partner. If the Blender community were a bit more accommodating, migration would turn from a trickle to a flood.
For the foreseeable future though, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the established commercial products because those are still the one’s you’ll likely find in game and VFX contexts.
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I’d say the industry standard software is slowly degrading and this degradation might speed up with the big studios falling apart. I mean damn, even enterprise Java infrastructure is being finally replaced, it has to happen to Autodesk too. Smaller studios without big codebases will eventually start looking for more optimal alternatives.
The thing is that Blender is nowhere near the capability to replace them, at least in the animation department. Just look at Unreal’s Control Rig and Houdini’s APEX, compare it to Blender’s rigging system and you’ll see what I mean.
I really hope they (the Blender community) continue to be such stubborn morons.
And I hope I don’t have to deal with this crap in a studio pipeline until the day I die. 
Yeah, I kinda have mixed feelings about this. For years I hoped that Blender will finally become good. But it never did, so I kept layering abstractions on top of Maya as usual. And then the new wave of rigging tools came, turned the whole idea upside down, while Blender… well, Blender added colouring to the armature bones. At this point I don’t care anymore. And I also hope Blender animators will never appear in my department.
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autodesk and maya might not be good at adapting new things to it and fixing the bugs they still have in their system, but most of the technical artists and maya programmers i know have worked with maya for so long that they do know how to fix/work around the bugs, add new elements to maya and extend it beyond what its usually capable of.
the biggest plus side for maya is its integrated animation system and since no other dcc has come to the same ease of use most industry animators will stick to maya and so the tech artists will too.
unreal is nice, but then you are only talking about the studios that use unreal, of which only a handfull adapt the control rig system
same with houdini, its an amazing procedural tool, but not an easy system to adapt to when just starting out and scary to start with for any non-technical field.
blender has similar learning curve problems; it allows you to use the hotkeys you are used to from the dcc you come from (great) but then all the tutorials, information on the internet and even help from colleagues does not work as explenations are always based on native hotkeys/workflows and they don’t transfer