https://dojotoolkit.org/blog/dojo-1-16-released not working for you?
that worked, but when I originally upgraded, there was a problem where I passed a node id instead of a domNode to domConstruct.destroy (I think) and whereas that worked in 1.9.3, it didn't work in 1.16.2.
_createSortQuerier
that would take care of this. Would that be the recommended way of approaching this?