[everdrive]

>>Yes, a firewall can prevent these connection

>Publicly addressable ≠ publicly reachable.

I already addressed this, and I know how firewalls work. It would be nice if on a per-device basis I could opt into a choice to be publicly addressable. Instead, the entire standard is built around this.

[avianlyric]

You literally can. You can just use local link addresses, IPv6 routers are guarantee not to forward those packets out of the network, or forward traffic into the network addresses to one of those IPs. Devices within the network can all still talk to each other.

If you really want to do the full Monty, add a NAT to your IPv6 router to have it translate to the local-link addresses, just like it would on IPv4.

I would highlight this is also identical to IPv4, which notably is also a standard built around the idea that every device in the world can, and should, be given a publicly addressable IP. Many large corporations and universities with /8 IP blocks do exactly this. Unfortunately when they originally wrote the IPv4 standard they slightly underestimated how many devices would eventually connect to the internet.