I remember the parts of the 90s where the most reliable LAN party connections for the games we were playing were IPX/SPX or worse, as I recall, and they didn't really have automatic addresses at all, so trial and error configuration tweaking in DOS config files, DOS Game UIs, the Windows 3.11 UIs, and then Windows 95 UIs was way too much of the process.

It is amazing to think how much IPv4 and IPv6 "just work" in comparison.

Oddly enough, my memory of IPX/SPX was that it "just worked" by default whereas when we switched to IP we started having to manually configure IP addresses and make sure no one chose the same address.

That said my first LAN party was 1996 and we were running Windows 95 by that point, which probably helped.