I completely disagree with this take.
First of all, NAT is what saved the Internet from being forked. IPv6 transition was a pipe dream at the time it was first proposed, and the vast growth in consumers for ISPs that had just paid for expensive IPv4 boxes would never have resulted in them paying for far more expensive (at the time) IPv6 boxes, it would have resulted in much less growth, or other custom solutions, or even separate IPv4 networks in certain parts of the world. Or, if not, it would have resulted in tunneling all traffic over a protocol more amenable to middle boxes, such as HTTP, which would have been even worse than the NAT happening today.
Then, even though it was unintentional, NAT and CGNAT are what ended up protecting consumers from IP-level tracking. If we had transitioned from IPv4 directly to IPv6, without the decades of NAT, all tracking technology wouldn't have bothered with cookies and so on, we would have had the trivial IP tracking allowed by the one-IP-per-device vision. And with the entrenched tracking adware industry controlling a big part of the Internet and relying on tracking IPs, the privacy extensions to IPv6 (which, remember, came MUCH later in IPv6's life than the original vision for the transition) would never have happened.
I won't bother going into the other kinds of important use cases that other middle boxes support, that a hostile IPv4 would have prevented, causing even bigger problems. NAT is actually an excellent example of why IPs design decisions that allow middle boxes are a godsend, not a tragic mistake. Now hopefully we can phase out NAT in the coming years, as it's served its purpose and can honorably retire.