[tenebrisalietum]

NAT is essentially required in IPv4 due to IPv4 address exhaustion.

NAT, when done on the carrier level (CGNAT), more or less prevents external systems from initating connections with anything on your network (without ISP involvement). You can still initiate outgoing connections fine.

Sounds great for security, but this enforces the existence of centralized services (middlemen) that you have to use/pay for if you want to have asynchronous communication with anyone that you might not necessarily initiate.

If you want a chance at a real decentralized Internet without dependency on tech giants, you're gonna need IPv6.

[saurik]

Does the CGNAT setup you contend with not support NAT-PMP/PCP? (To me that is the reasonable solution to the problem you cite, not IPv6, and I have been thinking it is already widely deployed... just not adopted by developers for some reason.)

[tenebrisalietum]

I don't contend with CGNAT, thankfully, but no one ever moves from IPv4 then everyone's going to eventually be behind a CGNAT at some point.

I don't know too much about NAT-PMP/PCP - so I'm looking into it.