You've probably heard of SCP: Containment Breach if you've heard of Blitz3D, or at least I'd hope. It's a pretty damn good game and made with yours truly, Blitz3D. No, it's not quite recent, but it's seen a Steam release of the multiplayer mod, and (not counting the latest version on Steam because it's become sort of a buggy mess, I'd recommend checking out the ModDb page here) is quite polished.
To answer your second question, I am, but I guess I don't have any real authority in the game world yet. I just like using older engines. I'm working on a minecraft-type clone in Blitz3D, which will be interesting to see if it works and fast enough to be enjoyable.
To answer your third question, I would say your experience with it depends on how complicated your normal programming adventures are. Honestly, I find the language very basic (ha, but it is BASIC so it is to be expected) and you can't do things like function dereferencing. Also, if you like writing nice and neat code, get ready to use your Tab button (or if you're a psychopath and use the spacebar) like crazy, there's no auto-indentation. For modelling, you can most certainly use Blender. It doesn't natively support .blend files, but it does support .3ds and one other file format for 3D models (something like that), which Blender supports. Hell, you can even write your own model file implementation, but I would not do that for a few reasons, mainly that's a lot of work and you'll have to do a lot of stuff in BASIC, which isn't exactly fun (at least, not for me).
Now, as for making games for modern day, just as with any programming language, it's not about the actual code, it's about the how. I believe that you can make a fully-fledged triple-A game (well, you most likely won't have hyper-monetization and thank god for that) in any programming language. Even brainfuck. Actually, that seems kinda fun now. A brainfuck CPU, with a... oh I'm going on a tangent again.
If you need me to clarify anything, please, let me know :)