Comment by paulddraper

The RFC introducing NAT -- RFC 1631 -- says:

> Unfortunately, NAT reduces the number of options for providing security [1]

Somehow, everyone forgot that, and it morphed into a cargo-culting security practice, even going so far as to propagate 1990s network limitations into the cloud(!)

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631.html