Comment by TheusHen

Absolutely agreed — and this is an important distinction.

IPv6 gives you global addressability, not guaranteed reachability. Stateful firewalls still exist and inbound-by-default is still rare on consumer networks.

The I6P design explicitly assumes that reality. The motivation for being IPv6-first is not “firewalls disappear”, but that the problem space collapses from many forms of NAT and address/port translation down to mostly predictable stateful filtering.

That’s also why the transport is QUIC/UDP: firewall behavior is far more consistent, hole punching is simpler, and path changes are survivable.

So IPv6 isn’t treated as magic — it’s treated as a cleaner substrate with fewer pathological cases than IPv4 NAT.