Comment by Sohcahtoa82

I think the problem is that everyone else is operating under the assumption that all the computers on the network still to be able to make outgoing connections to the Internet and you're not.

If I want all the computer on my network to have Internet access, I have two options: Each gets a publicly routable IP, which results in all computers being exposed to incoming connections unless I have a firewall, or I get a single IP which gets assigned to my router, use NAT, and all my devices are no longer exposed to incoming connections unless I go out of my way to configure port forwarding on the router.

So when I talk about the "side effect of using NAT", I really mean "side effect of using NAT instead of assigning public IPs to each computer on my network".

Does that help clear things up?