Note that this is much of the idea behind Rust (which is used by this series): browsers are too large and difficult for humans to guard against the presence of vulnerabilities, so we use software (i.e. compilers) to do it. Compilers have a much longer attention span than humans do.
Sandboxing can also achieve this, although at a much more coarse-grained level.
That said, i don't have any strategy at hand regarding browser complexity, but i believe as it gets more prominent, the change will come. At least i hope that the browser i'll be running in 5 years would be a saner piece of software.
What I'd like to see is support for more general, compiler supporting infrastructure. A platform where you could develop your domain specific languages and data structures that are then transformed to native environment. Kind of like JavaScript is used as a transpiler target, but you still need to have loads of functionality on top of browser base.
Then there could be ways to tag your data with semantics (this text is a heading, this is a link), accessibility, editorial intents (text select, copy/paste) that browser could use to display for specific devices and provide interaction (typing, touch).
Since browser is a place to present and produce almost everything digital, not one standard body nor a standard can provide this. HTML/JS/CSS was borne into what it is today for few, narrowly scoped purposes and is creakingly, laboriously converted into different thing each time you open a web app.
As a web developer, this is actually something that's good for my industry. What I don't need is more choices in browsers, more quirks I need to know and more issues to deal with across a multitude of platforms.
Sure, it's getting better. However, I hardly see a day in the near future where you can code something once and it works perfectly across every single browser.
I know this will not work for everything, especially app-like sites; but if web developers would do this for sites whose purpose is to provide information -- which is arguably one of the main goals of the Internet; then maybe it would be a better experience for all browsers, and we wouldn't have such absurdities as static pages that require JS to display.
Blink is not WebKit just as WebKit is not KHTML.
The person above is correct, most open-source browsers use some WebKit based engine OR Gecko. The differences between WebKit, Blink, and to a less extent KHTML don't change that fact. They're still the same core-codebase.
I've also been toying with designing and writing bits of code for a minimal (but still HTML/CSS compliant) rendering engine, although my goal was more to explore the limits of how simple a rendering engine can be while still being useful.