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Laziness, flexibility and cost.

Lazy network admins assume that a private network protects them against poor planning and decision-making.

Private networks give you more flexibility to do whatever crazy thing you want to do. For larger enterprise, this may mean building their own private internet.

For smaller users in particular, NATing saves time and money. You don't have to wrangle with ISPs who want to bill by IP, or get an IP block assigned.

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For larger enterprise, this may mean building their own private internet.

How does IPv6 change this? Either way, you have to use IP addresses assigned to you (public IPv6 addresses, or private IPv4 addresses) if you want to interface it to the public internet. Your physical firewall and router setup isn't going to change much, if at all.

If your private network will never be connected to the internet, you can use any old addressees and routing schemes you want. Nobody will care what you do because there is no risk of collision with anyone else.

ULA addresses in IPv6 allow unique local addresses that can be used by a large enterprise to build their own network, so that they have specific IPv6 endpoints always available, and then when their ISP hands them a different /64 or /56 they can continue to function as normal without renumbering.

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