NPAPI support in Firefox and Chrome actually dropped?
The phrases "block by default" and "no longer active by default" are referring to things that look, in general, like the last post you linked to. Neither will make it impossible for users to use NPAPI plugins. They will require users to explicitly approve instantiation of NPAPI plugins.
However, the Chromium blog post also says: "Eventually, however, NPAPI support will be completely removed from Chrome." When that happens, it will be impossible to load NPAPI plugins in Chrome.