That explains a lot of the sentiments I've seen on HN then...

I, unfortunately, have been on CGNATed residential internet since 2016, though I used to still get a public IP on request (they stopped doing that though.) I live in South East Asia, for context.

Without IPv6 my only choice would have been relying on a centralized service like Zerotier and Tailscale.

My current setup is CGNAT on 5G WAN (T-Mobile US), which obviously doesn't open public ports besides needed NAT.

Worse is I have IPv6 connectivity for devices, yet still no open ports available, so no serving available. And I only receive a /64 so no delegation available through router.

So now it's Hurricane Electric tunnel to their nearest (in my city) hosted node for IPv6 and a prepaid 50 USD/year node (technically x2 since I wanted a backup to play around with) for IPv4 port forwarding.

Both options are acceptable because the needed infra is close by in the largest metroplex in Texas, it just sucks to have to do all this extra work to replicate what I could do with a dial-up ISP.

I'll say this - having LLM assistants handle the nasty routing and firewall rules needed to make this hodge podge work without needing to be a network engineer has been very helpful.