To be clear, my proposal is that in a suitable instance, there would be no wrapper page—just the files archived by the user. This would match the behavior of browsing a node workspace, except of course it would work after the build completes. Nor is there are any real need for a wrapper merely to support multiple index pages, as you could just create multiple sidebar links.
Up to you about jenkins.version. There is no particular reason to wait for an LTS release. According to statistics (which lag a few weeks), a fair portion of the users who are running the latest plugin version to begin with are also running a weekly.
Arguably a change like this just belongs in a separate plugin.
See https://jenkins.io/security/advisory/2015-12-09/ & https://github.com/jenkinsci/htmlpublisher-plugin/pull/22 for background.