The general ignorance of the privacy benefits of NAT are what I'm reacting against too. It's certainly regrettable that end users are forced into NAT [0], but s

The general ignorance of the privacy benefits of NAT are what I'm reacting against too. It's certainly regrettable that end users are forced into NAT [0], but since then a shameless surveillance industry has cropped up, looking to exploit every bit of identifying information that it can. And it seems that calls for native IPv6 with everything having its own distinct address generally just ignore the practical privacy implications. It certainly seems possible to get a NAT-equivalent privacy from properly set up SLAAC. Although a sibling comment says that the proposal for variable length prefixes was just submitted this year?!? Equivalent privacy would also require things like consumer VPN providers allowing you to request a few new addresses every few minutes, whereas NAT makes a shared uniform distribution the default. Using a proxy instead of NAT is a good point, although there are certainly reasons I moved towards managing egress flows at the packet level with VMs rather than configuring software to play nice with proxies. And spiritually I would say that a proxy is an even more heavyweight version of NAT one layer up. [0] Although I don't personally think the web would have developed any less centralized without NAT as many people like to imagine