I really wish we would stop calling it ES6. Browser vendors should be especially careful to call ES2015 by its correct name and help stop perpetuating the confusion (ES6, ES7, ES2016, ES2017, you can see how this quickly gets confusing).
I'm a dev. I'm lazy. I have no particular objection to the idea of moving away from ES6 as a name, but if the new name isn't more useful, it's not going to gain any ground.
ES2015/ES6 might be 2 years ago, but feature complete support isn't yet available on all major browsers. I expect, however, that ES2016 will hit complete-or-basically-complete support relatively soon after full ES2015 support. If true (or any other irregularity over time), I might be 2 years behind on ES2015 and 1 year behind on ES2016 according to their names, but I might have, say 3 months until ES2015 is an option and 8 months for ES2016.
And of course, unlike, say, Java, it's not really a yes/no choice. I tend to use const/let, native promises, fetch(), and arrow functions, but haven't yet had/found/realized a need for generators...am I behind ES2015? If 30% of ES2016 is implemented by most browsers, and I use one feature included in that 30% in 2017, am I 1 year behind?
The ES6, ES7, etc labels do an equal job (that is, not a great one) of saying how behind you are, in a more compact package.
Not judging, but if high profile articles and browser vendors started addressing it correctly we wouldnt have any issues migrating, more syllables or not.
How are these problems alleviated if we change the name we use? Or have I totally misunderstood your point?
Side Note: I'm not a fan of using a year for the same reason we (i.e. most everyone) stopped using it for versioning - That previous iterations have been done on a yearly cycle does not mean that future iterations will follow that schedule. That, however, is a side argument that neither of us touched on.
You can see how this is confusing, here's a recent one just from today by Craig Federighi https://twitter.com/feross/status/871839072590979076
The next one might be different. But they really need to come up with a better than than "2017" or whatever. There's no similar problem with C or C++, and that's likely because they use 2 digit years, not 4 digit - C++17 isn't super short, but it's not a mouthful.
But hey, this is Apple which often insists on giving their OS releases both a number and a name and referring to them by each in different places (but hardly ever using both name and number at once), so. I feel like if I were able to tally up all the minutes I've spent cross-referencing "Wait, so 10.6, which one is that? Wait, so 'Leopard', which one is that?", it'd be depressing.
"Fifteen" isn't much worse than "seven" and this won't be an issue until for another 80 years.
When you speak it, nobody can hear the apostrophe.
Who is "we"?