This aspect is wrong, unless I'm this hypothetical no one, but somehow my passport has a different name on it. There are many cgNAT users and those numbers are only increasing, for those (e.g. me), IPv6 is the only option to get a public IP address, to get any incoming connections:
Additionally, at least around here, data centres have started charging extra for IPv4 addresses - yes, you can still get root- or v-servers with IPv4 addresses, but you have to pay for that privilege, while an IPv6 prefix is part of the base price. While you might need to pay that extra tax for hosting public resources, there are many use cases that are cost sensitive and only need to accommodate a short list of users (e.g. friends and family, where you can insist on IPv6-only and help them getting it working).
Around here (.de), IPv6 suddenly started becoming available natively among all larger ISPs (including mobile ISPs) around 2013-2015. Early on you might have had to opt-in (selecting a non-default APN or giving their customer support a call to enable it), but nowadays it is usually provided by default.
In general, there are two large blocks of users:
- those whose ISP doesn't hand out IPv6 addresses, offering IPv4-only
no problem with OpenWrt here, you only get link-local and ULA addresses on the LAN side, but no IPv6 connections are attempted to the outside (no globally routable prefix announced). - those whose ISP is supporting IPv6, more or less correctly
in many cases the OpenWrt default configuration will just work here, transparently. Clients will get global IPv6 addresses and can connect to remote IPv6 hosts. many users might not even notice IPv6 being there.
There are two problematic use cases:
- the one where the ISP is doing stupid things, offering partial- or borderline broken IPv6 support, this can cause issues (and delays), but if an ISP is this incompetent in 2024, they will mess up many other aspects of their operations as well.
- multi-wan setups are a bit more complex, not in theory, but in practice, as it requires either both ISPs to cooperate (transit of the alien prefixes, if they do that, it's easy) or things like NAT66.
At least the former of these should go extinct by the passing of time, as IPv6 is more and more prevalent.
On average, around 60% of my monthly traffic is IPv6 based, it works today and it's there to stay. The IPv4 address shortage isn't going away, it's just getting more severe - and any hypothetical 'prettier' alternative to IPv6 would take another 30 years to get deployed in the field (and it's safe to assume that isn't going to happen, ISPs and backbone operators have already paid for their IPv6 infrastructure and it's also available in almost all modern customer routers- and endpoint devices, maybe not on-by-default, maybe not working perfectly, but it's there and in wide spread use).