I used to think that, until I actually started using IPv6. It's a much more well designed protocol. The way switches and routers announce prefixes and network i

I used to think that, until I actually started using IPv6. It's a much more well designed protocol. The way switches and routers announce prefixes and network information using well defined UDP multicast is elegant and more robust. You can use link-local IP to always connect to a device on a local network. The biggest benefit for most users is having a large enough IP space that devices can self-assign a unique address with the networks prefix with very low risk of collision. Many of the problems seen on wifi or home networks are due to various ARP issues and devices not properly releasing their own DHCP addresses. It's still very common. I had a work laptop get booted off my network after 10 minutes for a while until eventually figuring out another device was stealing its assigned IP.