This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not

This story doesn't make any sense, because landing changes to WebKit is just as hard if not harder due to Apple's culture. Going from Gecko to WebKit would not have made it easier for Google to do code drops upstream. In fact, the slower pace of upstreaming into WebKit is one of the reasons why Blink was forked off (years later)