If you are saying this, you certainly didn't read the article (properly).
You can not "eradicate old legacy libraries" on whim - this stuff is out there. It is used by software out there. Software that would break if things like that would be removed. You can't just rip out and change parts of it at whim. You have to work around problems - at least until they wane in popularity and slowly die out. Evolution, rather then revolution - as stated in the article. That is exactly what TC39 is doing when they are improving on the standard and JavaScript itself.
Case in point: Array.prototype.values was a proposed feature - returning an iterator for the values in an array[1]. The feature was introduced and had to be backed out at least twice[2] because widely used web frameworks (in this case, Sencha) used the attribute "values" on arrays and webapps broke as the method was added to the Array prototype. And this wasn't the first case.
As for jQuery - nobody disputes that it had HUGE impact on the web - document.querySelector(All) itself is the living proof to that claim. It's just... it was around for waaay to long.
Building tools and extending what is currently made available to developers by the platform - all this is in our very natures as developers. We did that even in the early days, when low-level primitives were mostly missing to support us in that work.
Jake Archibald explains this in a comment on Nat Duca's post over at G+[1] - give developers some primitives; see what they do with them - then distill it and create high-performance features out of what now you already know there is a market for. TC39 works on this basic principle (everybody whines about types in JavaScript - TypeScript might be the JavaScript's jQuery here, paving the way for some distilled type system in JS (or SoundScript. or anything else that's out there).
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As for Apple - I am siding with Peter-Paul Koch on this[2] - Apple had some quite a few good deeds in favor of the web, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays it just seems to be protecting its walled garden that is native apps & the related ecosystem - certainly not giving a whole lot about making the web a better place (or devs, for that matter). The Pointer Events fiasco is a perfect reminder to all this.
For any good Apple has did to the web, the surely made equal bad so the scales are (IMHO, at most) 50-50 here.