Only after the IPv4 address exhaustion occurred did many people finally understand that IPv6 was a necessity and not just something they could avoid by deploying another layer of NAT.
The ISP I use was an early adopter of IPv6[2] and the first time I got an IPv6 address I remember wondering what all the fuss was about. For me as a consumer having an IPv6 address made almost no difference to my on-line experience. While that might sounds negative, it is actually a good thing, even several years ago IPv6 "just worked" for consumers.
Today we see many ISPs deploying IPv6 on consumer connections. The Google statistics[3] show just how rapid the growth of IPv6 has been in the past few years. If you zoom in you can see the positive spikes which occur at weekends. These show that home and mobile connections tend to have a higher IPv6 penetration than office networks.
1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1883
2) would also help a lot with the upcoming IoT security shitstorm
Also, it wouldn't really help stave off the amount of IP's required, and we'd still be out in months.
Fun fact, Stanford used to have an /8 but returned it since it wasn't using all it's addresses.
That requires the ISP to offer v6, of course. I'm on Comcast which, say what you will about them, has been years ahead of everyone else for carrier-grade v6 support.
We're going to get to the point where spinning up a VPS with an IPv4 address is going to get increasingly more and more expensive, unless we make some huge strides in moving to IPv6.