Can an Ra-02 handshake a NRF24l01

Possibly, but treat with a great deal of suspicion.

Those articles describe connecting SX1278 modules direct to 5V Arduinos, UNO and Nano.

SX1278 modules are 3.3V devices and should not be connected direct to 5V logic Arduinos, this is fairly basic stuff that you need to get right.

The last article also confusingly describes the connections as 'LORAWAN' but the LoRa library used cannot be used for LoRaWAN, that is a completly different setup to the simple point to point LoRa actually described.

I think what you're suggesting is to have the "receiver" unit request data from each of the transmitters so they won't "talk" over each other. The receiver unit then passes it on to the ESP8266 which sends it on to my Blynk application. Is that basically it?

Yes, in the example pointed to the master requestor builds this packet;

//build the request payload
    LT.startWriteSXBuffer(startaddr);           //initialise SX buffer write at address 0
    LT.writeUint8(RequestGPSLocation);          //identify type of packet
    LT.writeUint8(RequestStation);              //station to reply to request
    TXPayloadL = LT.endWriteSXBuffer();         //close SX buffer write

Which is a request to node 'RequestStation' to send its 'RequestGPSLocation'.

The requestor then waits for the GPS location in a reply from that particular slave. Explained here;