Orion is using WebKit. Chromium itself was a fork of WebKit. I don't know how much Chromium code gets upstreamed to WebKit any more, but Google certainly doesn't control it the way they do Chromium.

WebKit development is mainly driven by Apple, which isn't great from the perspective of having a browser free of corporate influence, but I trust them more than Google.

No, it is not.

It uses webkit, which is what Blink was forked from but likely has more in common with Safari at this point.

It's a webkit browser.