That said, I love my ES6/7 syntax sugar, and write a lot of server-side JS too, so the transpiling doesn't really bug me.

You mean straight DOM not JS because as a matter of fact, jQuery didn't add a lot to the feature set of JS but contributed immensely to fix/smooth the DOM API.

    [].concat(document.querySelectorAll('#foo > div')).forEach(function(div){
      //got my div
    })

    $('#foo > div').each(function(){
      var div = this;
      //never liked this pattern, and even then why isn't "this" a jQuery object?
    });

As to why... well, it makes more sense with jQuery's event listeners (`$(this)` being much shorter than `$(event.currentTarget)` and usually being what you actually want), and thus I guess in the name of consistency it's good to have all callbacks behave the same way. Why it's not a jQuery object... pass. More often than not that would be what you want, and if it's not, `.get(0)` or `[0]` is hardly a great stretch. Historical reasons, perhaps.

If I'm iterating over collections of elements and I have access to Underscore, I'll just use `_.each($("..."))`, which has the benefits of a more suitable `this` and the callback arguments in a sensible order (element then index).

    $('#foo').click(function(foo,event){ ... });
    $('#foo .item').each(function(item,index){...});

    $('#foo').click(function(event){ var foo = $(this); ...})
    $('#foo .item').each(function(index){ var item = $(this); }

    $('#foo').bind('foo',myContextObject.handleFoo.bind(myContextObject));

Once ES6 is well handled by the browsers a lot of these intermediate shims/libraries will go away anyways.

As to webpack, conceptually it's awesome... though it just feels a bit alien to me in practice. Just a few layers too much PFM (pure f*ing magic) for my taste, when I am already using ES6/7 syntax more and more in addition to React, BabelJS, Browserify bits.