You have not heard if before, because that is the most naive and stupid take imaginable. It is the “let them eat cake” of networking.

It does not work like that. Put extra octets where exactly? Where would a hardware router put the extra bytes? Where would software with 32 bit buffers?

You would still need to replace all of the software and hardware and have the exact same problem.

Your hardware can do Natural Address Translation. More octets is basically taking this idea further, to make a "big NAT".