Part of this would just be transitory, but... would take up far less space. Even as late as last year, I'm reading stories about BGP issues and slowdowns because routing tables are too large/many for the hardware. In 2024. How on earth was this expected to work on hardware from 1999?

But even if they had the counter argument to "128 bit addresses are too long, 48 bit would have been better" is obviously not "that's the same thing just with 48 bit addresses!"