The way to signal to Conduit that a reviewer is considered blocking is just to
wrap their PHID in "blocking()" when including it in the list of PHIDs passed
to reviewers.add.
arc doesn't have a --blocker, instead one is supposed to append a '!' to the
end of reviewer names (I think reviewers are usually added in an editor rather
than the command line, where '!'s can be more hazardous).
moz-phab (Mozilla's arcanist wrapper) does have a --blocker argument, and being
explicit like this is also more discoverable. Even arc diff's help doesn't
seem to mention the reviewer! syntax.