So does a firewall, in a much less complicated way.
Re:Hanging S3 downloads
by the_mitsuhiko on Thursday July 20, 2017 @05:43PM
(#14816562)
NATs are not terribly complex and most consumer grade firewalls are significantly worse than a simple NAT is.
It by default ensures that machines inside a network are not reachable from the outside world. It gives you one address to the outside world which made IP blocks for abuse work quite well and enabled a lot of other users.
Sure, it's a bit of a pain for UDP communication but given the common NAT behaviours not completely terrible. If it was defined a bit clearer NAT would not have been that controversial.