Alarmists have been telling us for at least 15 years that the IPv4 space is about to be exhausted and how disastrous that will be. So far, nothing has happened.
Everything the "alarmists" told us has already happened. IPv4 address space has already run out which now means that you often have to pay an ever increasing fee to use a public IPv4 address, if you get one at all (more and more people are sitting behing a CG-NAT). Public IPv6 blocks are completely free.
The functionality of the Internet is severely degraded by NAT, and has been for all of those "at least 15 years". The network can't deliver its most basic function, which is to let any node talk to any other node at will.
As a result, the designs of huge numbers of higher-layer protocols have been warped and complicated, and the whole thing has contributed to the whole maelstrom of extreme commercial centralization pressures, too.
Everybody who wasn't willing to hard cut over to IPv6 should have been forced off of the Internet 20 years ago.
There are very valid reasons to want to send traffic to a node so called "out of the blue", and suggesting otherwise suggests you have never looked deeper than HTTP.
The internet as consumers know it becoming only a tool to browse websites and not an actual internet connection that can do say, peer-to-peer gaming, sucks.
Tell that to millions of people stuck behind CG-NAT. Tell that to ISPs trying to serve communities on shoe-string budgets:
> I work for a Native American tribe in the PNW. We scrambled to get the reservation reliable internet in the later part of 2019. We managed to cover most of the reservation with wi-max and wifi with a fiber back haul configuration. We are now slowly getting more stable and reliable fiber to the home(FttH) service installed to as many homes as we can, but it is slow process covering the mostly rural landscape doing all the work in house.
> Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.
> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.
* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624
IPv4-only products and services is a problem right now.
And unless laws force them to, which will be hard to implement because individual countries do not want to hamper their own economic competitivity, the industries won't do anything more than the actual greenwashing.
Chabges usually have to be implemented BEFORE the disasters happen. In a seismic zone, we should build earthquake resistant buildings now, not after the first major earthquake.
What's happened is that everybody has been forced behind NAT, completely obliterating pretty much the whole point of Internet to begin with, and that addresses that could be essentially free are super expensive. But la la la nothing has happeeeeeeeened!
Overexaggerating only makes your point come across as weak, and in my case, made me think it was all bullshit for money.
Just be honest.
And exactly who do you think is profiting?
In either case, it has little to do with IPv6, so I'll leave it there.