KHTML is dead now, though. It was basically embraced, extended and extinguished by Apple and Google, who both wanted to take away the leverage of the community.

Today, legacy KHTML maintainers are boxed-out of upstream decisions that might prevent Manifest v2 from swirling down the drain. I'd argue the story isn't very beautiful anymore.

True. Although the cruel twist is now that KDE's upstream decisions are boxing out X11/sysvinit/etc maintainers.