Comment by Dagger2

They didn't screw up. They made it a breaking change to OSs because it had to be a breaking change to OSs. If anyone screwed up here, it was the people who made v4, not the ones that made v6.

For ping, I think it originally had different binaries because ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are different protocols, but Linux has had a dual-stack `ping` binary for a very long time now. You can just use `ping` for either address family.