Your chain of causality is comically nonsensical. First of all, Opera isn't owned "by China," it's a publicly traded company whose largest shareholder happens to be Chinese. The company's still Norwegian. Second of all, that didn't happen until 2016. Opera Software ASA (now Otello ASA) are the ones who switched to Chromium 3 years before that because they had decided that Presto couldn't compete with WebKit anymore. I disagree with that decision but that's what happened.

About the sliminess I expected.

I signed the KDE For People open letter, am the third name on it in fact, and pointed the person who wrote it to the domain name it uses because I checked and it was cheap enough for her to afford it. I take pretty great offense at being labeled a "brigader" and take even more offense at that only quietly being walked back after enough people had said he's using the word wrong for it to somehow stick. I also got to become a member of the "blocked by KDE club" on my Wafrn account because I guess pointing out that they are doing the thing they claimed they're not doing is a badness. I didn't leave KDE. They burned that bridge for me.

…I don't get it.

That's a horrifying concept oh no.