I think that the issue is not the XSLT implementation (that could be contained), but its deep intégration in the XML stack which is part of web pages processing. Think about XML "processing instructions".
In an XML document a "processing instruction" can trigger the XSLT processor to transform the document in another format.
So an XML document would be parsed and processed by the XML engine, trigger XSLT processor, which would then trigger again the XML processor again and the HTML processor.
So XSLT processing for XML/XHTML is deeply embedded. Dropping it removes a lot of corner cases that AI is good at exploiting.
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