My understanding of options is that many routers and/or firewalls consider it a dangerous and deprecated field and are most likely to drop packets that use them

My understanding of options is that many routers and/or firewalls consider it a dangerous and deprecated field and are most likely to drop packets that use them, especially when they are variably sized. That also gets back to the point that almost all of IPv4 is too "known" as a design and every field accounted for in some router and/or firewall logic somewhere by the time IPv6 was designed.