haha, oh man you had me going there for a second.
An example ; when we start throwing smart nano on the grass, to see how each blade of grass is doing on your lawn. Well, each nano is going to need an IP address, and so will all in the neighbourhood. And that's just the grass.
What about when some scientist wants to track sand dispersal patterns, on a beach, after a hurricane? And wants to have each grain of sand tagged with its own nano hitchhiker? Just think of the IP addresses we'll need then!
And even medicine. What if we want to interally tag each cell in our bodies with nano? What if we want to bioengineer our body, so that each cell has its own IP address? And can report health/condition?
No, we need more, more more IP addresses! So many more.
There will need to be multiple addresses for all the nano-services running inside each of those nanobots. Solution: install a k8s cluster with each nano...
The first is, they were working on this before the Internet was widely used. Back in dialup days, pre-2000, the draft presented in 1998, working on it in 1995 and before surely.
Compared to today's scope and size, this was nascent/early style change, in something which was constantly changing.
They didn't see any contention likely at the time. Why not have all the universities, government departments, and research bodies switch? This was an entirely different landscape compared to today.
So in their eyes, why not make change? It wasn't a big deal, hell back in the early 90s, people were using token ring adapters/networking still in many offices!!
The second thing is, NAT wasn't a thing back then. The computational power was a limiter for large scale usage.
An RFC for NAT came out in 98 I think, and Linux had ipmasq, but that was brand new in the early 90s.
Basically, ipv6 was crafted before anyone had any idea we'd be where we are today.
In fact, the worry about address space exhaustion in the early 90s was due to a lack of NAT, or even the idea that it could be deployed everywhere at scale.
Where would all the compute power for NAT at scale come from?!
So basically, it was crafted with a different viewpoint.
That would be a good BS level graduate thesis paper for someone interested.
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/IPv6-addresses-how...
"[...] assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths."