IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew?
I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC and telnetting madly via a VAX and a X.25 PAD and what I now know was close to magic!
No one had any idea how things would turn out back then.
I'm actually quite impressed how long IPv4 has managed to work and without NAT (which I do mildly despise, given 30 years messing with this stuff), it would be stuffed.
Thank you for your work.
I had a corporate internship in the late 1990s and they blocked external web access.
They did, however, allow external Telnet access. This meant that whenever I had free time and/or was waiting for new projects, I would telnet back to my college server and use lynx to go read my favorite websites.