I think there was some perceived initial concern about the patches provided by Apple to KHTML in so much as they now had to merge a huge amount of code into the project and much of it was (IIRC) lots and lots of ifdef statements.
Yes, but the main issue was the volume and frequency of patches, not that the patches were intentionally hard to upstream (you can always complain about style, though). I don’t have the links handy right now but I remember the discussions amongst the KHTML devs at the time.