Like cesarb's sibling comment, I think router driven packet truncation would be useful. IP fragmentation is generally problematic and router driven fragmentation was eliminated from IPv6, but truncation with in-band indication would work a lot better. For TCP, the kernel on the receiver of a truncated packet could send an in-band ack of the received bytes, with a tcp option indicating the effective MTU.
For UDP, it would be a bit more complicated, you would need to alter the recvmsg syscall to provide both the original size and the received size, and transmitting that information back to the sender would be protocol specific of course. The sender would then either trigger IP fragmentation to appropriate sizes or some protocol specific fragmentation.
For this to work, L4 protocols would need to be completely redone to consider and work with this concept.
Also, what is actually meant to happen is that an ICMP(v6) packet too big message is supposed to be sent back to inform the sender that they need to reduce the packet size.
Unfortunately, with the pervasiveness of idiotic firewall configurations that blanket block ICMP, this falls apart which is why we have to deal with ugly hacks like TCP MSS mangling.