What is the intuition behind 'mol' as a unit 'symbol'
The symbol mol is due to Ostwald who was a very influential and respected physical chemist more than a century ago. In German, &quot;mole&quot; is &quot;Mol&quot;. It is a shortform of Molekül.
I believe the Internet Archive has an English translation of his historically famous book of 19th century. This is where I recall reading this. The original reference is W. Ostwald Hand- und Hilfsbuch zur Ausführung physikochemischer Messungen. This book is available on Google Books (pg 278). A footnote appears there:

Um nicht stets den schleppenden Ausdruck Gramm -Molekulargewicht brauchen zu müssen, werde ich diese Größe in der Folge kurzweg Mol nennen, und erlaube mir, diesen Vorschlag zur allgemeinen Annahme zu empfehlen. Man schreibt ohnedies diese Größe häufig Mol., und braucht daher nur den Punkt fortzulassen.

In order not to always have to use the sluggish expression gram - molecular weight, I will simply call this quantity Mol in the following, and allow me to recommend this proposal for general acceptance. Anyway, this quantity is often written as Mol., so you only have to omit the point.
Translated via (www.deepl.com) with some manual changes.