To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement.
(To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1])
Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option.
[0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i...
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...