Exactly. This is far outside my professional field, but lately I've found that one of the better ways to read the tea leaves of the next decade is to look at the boring 3GPP/ETSI material rather than the consumer-facing "6G/7G" discussion.

The interesting part of 6G doesn't seem to be faster downloads so much as sensing. ISAC is basically about making the network capable of sensing the physical environment as well as communicating.

Some of the current work is already discussing the "six sensing modes", involving different combinations of the network and UEs transmitting and receiving signals reflected from objects, and even how users might be incentivized to let their devices participate

That feels potentially much more consequential than another speed bump. 3G/4G didn't just make phones faster; they enabled an entire ecosystem that was hard to predict beforehand. My guess is that sensing could be a similar pivot for 6G.

Over 5G you need specialized suits, like fighter pilots have.

No it is not. 2G->3G->4G->5G refer to real changes in technology and system architecture, as detailed in the Wikipedia page you linked to.

3GPP releases are more fine-grained than that. E.g. rel. 99 introduced 3G/WCDMA, rel. 8 introduced 4G/LTE, etc. Other releases only add features.

In the industry Gs are used all the time to refer to the technology/architecture, then releases are used to refer to specific features, though generally noone supports all the features of a release.