It is also, as a matter of practicality, going to be very difficult to find 144 colors that can‘t be mistaken for one another, particularly in conditions that i would imagine wouldn‘t have great lighting.
If they’re all in use and it’s point to point, might be easier connecting whatever to whatever. Then simultaneously swap line cards around as they get lit up or letting IP do its thing.
Not as feasible as it sounds initially. I don't know if you've ever looked inside a cat-5/6/whatever networking cable[1], but if you do, you'll see that it is actually a bundle of 8 individual wires, in 4 twisted-together pairs, color coded. Those different wires carry different electrical signals, and if the various signals are not supposed to be on the various wires they are supposed to be on, the connection won't work.
So imagine if you cut a Cat6 cable in half, and then spliced the individual wires back together without regard to which wires you connected. Very likely, Pair 1 negative is connected Pair 3 negative, Pair 2 has its polarity reversed, etc, and so the network link never comes online.
At the individual device level, fiber cables are connected in pairs, in a crossover fashion. Device A Tx connects to Device B Rx, and vice versa. So with a random splicing, you would end up with pairs getting crossed or broken up, invalidating the connections and labeling of every patch panel downstream, making for yet more work than the initial work of splicing the cut bundle.
1. Not impugning your intelligence, knowledge, or character here, some people never have because they've never needed or wanted to, and that's totally okay.
It is still a lot of work, and so far not automated.