NAT is definitely the villain but their are other things as well. You still need a discovery system to find who you want to connect with. An ip isn’t very good

NAT is definitely the villain but their are other things as well. You still need a discovery system to find who you want to connect with. An ip isn’t very good because it moves around, and DNS is too slow to be operationally viable. And even if you solve those you have an N^2 problem in the naive solution, and to reduce that you need mesh networks which just don’t have the QoS we’ve come to expect (to my meager knowledge). Imo we should be able to find a better middle ground, because full decentralization is insanely hard. If we had federated standards and tooling like web and email, but for modern use cases, I’d be a happy man. Despite (or perhaps because) the tech craze over the last decade, the developments of such open and useful standards leaves a lot to be desired. Almost everything cool these days is some app with perhaps an api that is branded as a “platform”. We’re basically treading water.