> Browsers developed with vi-like modes built-in (vimprobable, vimb, qutebrowser) fared better for me, but then there's other issues like incompatibility or lack of plugins which keeps me from fully using them.

I've had this issue too with qutebrowser. I'm not very familiar with how these things work, but I wonder why plugins written for a given engine (say webkit) wouldn't work on all browsers using that engine. In the case of qutebrowser it uses chromium under the hood, so I would expect extensions that work on chromium to work on qutebrowser, just as most chromium limitations also apply to qutebrowser.