You’re still in development after all these years, Aaron!

A lot of of ES6 purists want to remove jQuery entirely, but as you said once someone starts going beyond a few one-off replacements, they often want to re-organize your ES6 code into something more efficient, the discussion will certainly focus on writing a wrapper library or utility functions for the ES6 code. At that point, you are walking the same path that jQuery’s creator did.

jQuery has been battle-tested and had some of the best minds on it. I would have serious reservations that any one individual or small group could write a wrapper library for ES6 that would be even smaller and better than jQuery.