Yes, routinely. You can find plenty of articles which had much less support in sources when they were created here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:AfC_submissions_by_da... That Wikipedians rejected the article is a moot point because the argument is that the rules are not applied consistently.

Blogs are not a consistently reliable source, particularly for notability claims. It depends on the subject and on the blog. I'm not making this up; I spent a year doing AfD patrol, and this was probably the most frequently debated point in AfD arguments.

Obviously, they can't always be WP:RS, because then literally everything would be "notable", since anyone can stand up a blog about anything. You can't even logically assemble the argument you're trying to make.

I didn't claim that blogs were consistently reliable sources. I claimed that they were routinely used as evidence of notability. Evidence of notability != Reputable source.

I'm not making anything up either; I have penned several articles on Wikipedia and gotten them through the AfC process with much less notability evidence than the Apache Arrow draft had. The difference was that I used to be an established contributor so the rules were not as harsh against we as they are against newbies and unknown contributors.

Also, you can look at the link I gave you and see that the notability rules are not uniformly applied.