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Tanspiling from ES2015 to ES5 is no longer the main usage of babel. For example, there is transforming JSX to normal JS. And object rest/spread proprerties (ES2018) is often used by front developers, even if it is not supported by Edge. So, I don't think that babel and swc will be obsolete in 2 years. The most used transform plugins for those will change, but the parser and engine will remain. And having fast and robust tool here is a good thing for this field.

If you use dynamically rendered content then ES6 won’t work in googlebot, since that’s still Chrome 41. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/rendering.

JS is not browser only for a long time now, there might be situations where you have to target old JS runtimes.

IE 11 is still relevant and large code bases can take a long time to compile with Babel.

Why invest time? Probably someone thought it would be fun to beat Babel's performance :)