The intent of "Wi-Fi 6" is to start versioning Wi-Fi numerically (i.e. the next major rev will be Wi-Fi 7) instead of the IEEE's ever-lengthening 802.11 alphabet soup.

It's just a coincidence that we're also talking about 6 GHz at the same time. No formal relation.

The alphabet soup still makes more sense than names like USB Gen 3.2 2x2. Then again, because the door has been opened now by marketing guys to stray away from engineer driven names. It won't be long until WIFI 7 ULTIMATE ULTRA EXTREME 4 PRO EDITION is a thing.

Then why is GP referring to 6E? Sounds like more alphabet soup, to me.

That’s actually fairly standard naming in networking, like cat5 cables, cat5e is cat5 but after fixing a few bugs in the standard. Cat6 came out later and supersedes cat5 and cat5e.

Think of it like 6.1 instead of 6E. Minor revision to the existing standard.

Partially true. 6E is specific to 6GHz and not a revision of Wi-Fi 6.

I’m not sure that ghz and version number were ever intended to be interchangeable, were they? I think if it happened it would be a happy coincidence.

True, it is coincidence IEEE 802.11 --> Wi-Fi 1

IEEE 802.11b --> Wi-Fi 2

IEEE 802.11a --> Wi-Fi 3

IEEE 802.11n --> Wi-Fi 4

IEEE 802.11ac --> Wi-Fi 5

IEEE 802.11ax --> Wi-Fi 6

IEEE 802.11ax in 6 GHz --> Wi-Fi 6E

IEEE 802.11be --> Wi-Fi 7

Has nothing todo with GHz frequency.

It could be worse. You could have a business facing physical layer made by the same people and spend weeks trying to decipher what someone means when they says 802.3bj as opposed to 802.3-2015 when referencing 100GBASE-CR4, or it's medium-less counterpart: CAUI-4.