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.

X11 and sysvinit are not downstream KParts libs like KHTML was. KDE has no obligation to fork or support either project.

KDE is not a fork, nevertheless KDE was building on X11 heavily and now they are trying to kill it.

So while technically not the same story as if it was a direct fork of X11, practically they have the 'obligation' to support X11 indefinitely. KDE trying to kill X11 too is the same exact EEE that you mentioned as a sad story in regads of KHTML.

KDE is not obliged to support X11 any more than they're obliged to support JACK1 or sysvinit. They're all in maintenance mode, KDE couldn't embrace or extend them even if they wanted to.

KHTML is tragic because it had willing developers working for the public good. Jack1 and X11 are not tragic, because their developers were already drafting transition plans to depreciate their libraries.

There are no X11 maintainers, there’s nobody to block out. In terms of users, of course there are X11 users. But nobody is maintaining it in any meaningful way and it’s been that way for years.

Also sysvinit is straight up obsolete software. Even if you hate systemd, there’s just no reason to use sysvinit because things like OpenRC and runit exist.

In addition, the adoption of systemd has lead to needing to maintain less init scripts because systemd units are just more portable. It used to be that every single distro and even versions of that distro required specialized init scripts for every application.